Extreme weather events, such as droughts and heat waves, are expected to become more severe and more frequent in the coming years, and understanding their impacts on demographic rates is of increasing interest to both evolutionary ecologists and conservation practitioners. An individual's breeding probability can be a sensitive indicator of the decision to initiate reproductive behavior under v...

© The Ecological Society of America www.frontiersinecology.org E are experiencing not only gradual shifts in mean climate conditions but also dramatic changes in climate variability and prevalence of extreme climatic events (ECEs). ECEs such as droughts, floods, severe storms, and heat waves are changing in frequency, magnitude, timing, and duration, depending on the region and the specific cli...

Dispersal is a life-history trait directly affecting population dynamics and species range shifts and thus playing a prominent role in the response to climate change. Nonetheless, the relationship between extreme climatic events and dispersal has received little attention in birds. Here we focused on climatic, demographic and individual factors affecting the dispersal propensity of a major glos...

Climate change is projected to increase the frequency of extreme events, such as flooding and droughts, which are anticipated to have negative effects on the biodiversity of primary producers and consequently the associated consumer communities. Here we assessed the effects of an extreme early summer flooding event in 2013 on ant colonies along an experimental gradient of plant species richness...

The Earth’s mean surface air temperature has warmed by 1° C over the last 100 years and is projected to increase at a faster rate in the future, accompanied by changes in precipitation patterns and increases in the occurrence of extreme weather events. In western North America, projected increases in mean annual temperatures range from 1 to 3.5° C by the 2050s, and although projected changes in...

An Integrated Extreme Climatic Index (IECI) is defined for analyzing the overall trend of change in the frequencies of major extreme climatic events over mainland China. The index is composed of 7 individual extreme indicators, i.e. the country-averaged frequencies of high temperature, low temperature, intense precipitation, dust storm and strong wind events, meteorological drought area percent...

In the mid-1930s, eastern Oklahoma, USA, suffered an unusually harsh mixture of droughts and extreme rainfall events that led to widespread crop failure over several years. These climatic conditions coincided with low commodity prices, agricultural restructuring and general economic collapse, creating tremendous hardship in rural and agriculturally dependent areas. Using a previously developed ...