Climate projections agree on a dryer and warmer future for the Mediterranean. Consequently, the region is likely to face serious problems regarding water availability and quality in the future. We investigated potential climate change impacts, alone (for three scenario periods) and in combination with four socio-economic scenarios (for the near future) on water resources in a Mediterranean catc...

BACKGROUND The Mediterranean region is particularly vulnerable to the effect of summer temperature.Within the CIRCE project this time-series study aims to quantify for the first time the effect of summer temperature in Eastern-Southern Mediterranean cities and compared it with European cities around the Mediterranean basin, evaluating city characteristics that explain between-city heterogeneity...

Aerosol optical properties at Lampedusa (Central Mediterranean) – 2. Determination of single scattering albedo at two wavelengths for different aerosol types D. Meloni, A. di Sarra, G. Pace, and F. Monteleone ENEA, Climate Laboratory, S. Maria di Galeria, Roma, Italy ENEA, Climate Laboratory, Palermo, Italy Received: 5 November 2004 – Accepted: 10 February 2005 – Published: 14 July 2005 Corresp...

We report here on two complementary experiments examining the effect of climate on morphological and life-history traits of antlion adults. We first examined whether body size and wing loading of emerging adults are plastic by raising larvae, collected from five antlion populations along Israel's sharp climatic gradient, in two environmental chambers simulating temperature and humidity of deser...

The broad correspondence between the sclerophyllous shrub form and the climate in mediterranean-type ecosystems indicates a climatic control over the vegetation particularly with respect to the summer drought, but all five regions are noted for nutrient deficiencies, especially Australia and South Africa. As studies of these ecosystems are completed, divergences related to the control of commun...

Mediterranean cypress, an evergreen softwood species, is well-known as Cupressus sempervirens L. var. horizontalis Mill. (Gord). It is an indigenous species of Mediterranean Europe and western Asia, including, Cyprus, Crete, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Caucasian and Iran, resembling the Mediterranean climate (Sabeti, 2004). It is belonged to warming period and interglacial climate. Plant struc...

Plant-plant interactions influence how forests cope with climate and contribute to modulate species response to future climate scenarios. We analysed the functional relationships between growth, climate and competition for Pinus sylvestris, Quercus pyrenaica and Quercus faginea to investigate how stand competition modifies forest sensitivity to climate and simulated how annual growth rates of t...

The project CLIMB (Climate Induced Changes on the Hydrology of Mediterranean Basins – Reducing Uncertainty and Quantifying Risk through an Integrated Monitoring and Modelling System, www.climb-fp7.eu) aims to investigate present and future climate induced changes in the hydrological budgets and extremes for Mediterranean and neighbouring countries. We provide a concept for an integrated modelli...

Mountain glaciers respond directly to changes in precipitation and temperature, thus their margin extent is a high-sensitivity climate proxy. Here, we present a robust (10)Be chronology for the glacier maximum areal extent of central Spain paleoglaciers dated at 26.1 ± 1.3 ka BP. These glaciers reached their maximum extent several thousand years earlier than those from central Europe due to the...