The evidence that climate warming is changing the distribution of Ixodes ticks and the pathogens they transmit is reviewed and evaluated. The primary approaches are either phenomenological, which typically assume that climate alone limits current and future distributions, or mechanistic, asking which tick-demographic parameters are affected by specific abiotic conditions. Both approaches have p...

A reverence for ancestors that has pre-occupied humans since time immemorial persists to the present. Reconstructing ancestry is the focus of many biological studies but failure to distinguish between present-day descendants and long-dead ancestors has led to incorrect interpretation of phylogenetic trees. This has resulted in erroneous reconstruction of traits such as morphology and ancestral ...

This paper discusses the need for a more integrated approach to modelling changes in climate and crops, and some of the challenges posed by this. While changes in atmospheric composition are expected to exert an increasing radiative forcing of climate change leading to further warming of global mean temperatures and shifts in precipitation patterns, these are not the only climatic processes whi...

Identification of climatic indices are vital in essence of their ability to characterize different climatic events. We focus on discovery of climatic indices important for Indian summer monsoon from climatic parameters surface pressure and zonal wind velocity. We use climatic network based community detection approach for discovery of climatic indices. New indices depict better correlation with...

Alaskan salmon stocks have exhibited enormous fluctuations in production during the 20th century. In this paper, we investigate our hypothesis that large-scale salmon-production variability is driven by climatic processes in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. Using a time-series analytical technique known as intervention analysis, we demonstrate that Alaskan salmonids alternate between high and low p...

The rate of climatic-niche evolution is important to many research areas in ecology, evolution, and conservation biology, including responses of species to global climate change, spread of invasive species, speciation, biogeography, and patterns of species richness. Previous studies have implied that clades with higher rates of climatic-niche evolution among species should have species with nar...

In integrated assessments of climate change, greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change impacts provide the linkages between the world economy and the climate system. Key climatic processes operate at the scales of centuries. This requires highly aggregated models for portraying the dynamics of the economic system. An extended Ramsey-type optimal growth model is presented as the appropriate to...

Aim Climatic niche breadth (the range of climatic conditions that a species experiences over space and time) is a fundamental topic in ecology, biogeography and evolution. But what determines the climatic niche width of species? In 1967, Janzen suggested that climatic niche widths for temperature were determined by levels of seasonal fluctuation in temperature at each locality, such that niche ...

While average temperature is likely to increase in most locations on Earth, many places will simultaneously experience higher variability in temperature, precipitation, and other climate variables. Although ecologists and evolutionary biologists widely recognize the potential impacts of changes in average climatic conditions, relatively little attention has been paid to the potential impacts of...

Many organisms are accumulating climatic debt as they respond more slowly than expected to rising global temperatures, leading disequilibrium of species diversity with contemporary climate. The resulting transient dynamics complex and may cause overoptimistic biodiversity assessments. We propose a simple budget framework integrate two classes intervention: (i) credits that pay some the debt, re...