Erosion is a major threat for coasts worldwide, beaches in particular, which constitute one of the most valuable coastal landforms. Vulnerability assessments related to beach erosion may contribute to planning measures to counteract erosion by identifying, quantifying and ranking vulnerability. Herein, we present a new index, the Beach Vulnerability Index (BVI), which combines simplicity in cal...

Rapid climate change characterizes numerous terrestrial sediment records during and since the last glaciation. Vegetational response is best expressed in terrestrial records near ecotones, where sensitivity to climate change is greatest, and response times are as short as decades.

Shifting flowering phenology with rising temperatures is occurring worldwide, but the rarity of co-occurring long-term observational and temperature records has hindered the evaluation of phenological responsiveness in many species and across large spatial scales. We used herbarium specimens combined with historic temperature data to examine the impact of climate change on flowering trends in 1...

Amongst Asian countries India is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. During the past century, surface temperature in India has shown a significant increasing trend. In this paper, we have investigated behavior of mean monthly temperature during the period 1901-2001 over four agroclimatic zones of India and also tried to detect structural change in the temperature series. A s...

Introduction Conclusions References

associated with global climate change (e.g. Lambeck et al. 2002; Miller et al. 2005; IPCC 2001; IPCC 2007; Hansen et al. 2007; Broecker and Kunzig 2008). For example, during the last interglacial warm period (~125,000 yrs BP) sea level was approximately 5 m higher than present, and during the Last Glacial Maximum (~21,000 yrs BP), sea level was about 120 m lower than present (Figure 1) (Fairban...

The human aspects of conservation are often overlooked but will be critical for identifying strategies for biological conservation in the face of climate change. We surveyed the behavioral intentions of coastal landowners with respect to various conservation strategies aimed at facilitating ecosystem migration for tidal marshes. We found that several popular strategies, including conservation e...

Changing economies and patterns of trade, rather than climatic deterioration, could have critically marginalized the Norse Greenland settlements and effectively sealed their fate. Counter-intuitively, the end of Norse Greenland might not be symptomatic of a failure to adapt to environmental change, but a consequence of successful wider economic developments of Norse communities across North Atl...