Ancient trees are considered one of the most important habitats for biodiversity in Europe and North America. They support exceptional numbers of specialized species, including a range of rare and endangered wood-living insects. In this study, we use a dataset of 105 sites spanning a climatic gradient along the oak range of Norway and Sweden to investigate the importance of temperature and prec...

Evidence is growing that not only allopatric but also sympatric speciation can be important in the evolution of species. Sympatric speciation has most convincingly been demonstrated in laboratory experiments with bacteria, but field-based evidence is limited to a few cases. The recently discovered plethora of subterranean diving beetle species in isolated aquifers in the arid interior of Austra...

Coal fires, including both underground and coal waste pile fires, result in large losses of coal resources and emit considerable amounts of greenhouse gases. To estimate the annual intensity of greenhouse gas emissions and the loss of coal resources, estimating the annual loss from fire-influenced coal seams is a feasible approach. This study assumes that the primary cause of coal volume loss i...

The impact of climate change on herbivorous insects can have far-reaching consequences for ecosystem processes. However, experiments investigating the combined effects of multiple climate change drivers on herbivorous insects are scarce. We independently manipulated three climate change drivers (CO2, warming, drought) in a Danish heathland ecosystem. The experiment was established in 2005 as a ...

Urban habitats are characterized by high levels of disturbance, impervious paving, and heat retention. These factors, acting in concert, alter soil, water, and air conditions in ways that promote the growth of stress-tolerant, earlysuccessional vegetation on abandoned or unmaintained land. In most urban areas, a cosmopolitan array of spontaneous plants provide important ecological services that...

The paper makes a case for information and communication technologies (ICT) in small businesses against the broader backdrop of the developing economy of India. ICTs come to India through two routes; the global employment route of IT information companies or the development route of donor-driven services to bridge internal digital divide. Local and context specific ICT based services in small b...

In the study of the meaning of natural language expressions, the sentence level provides a natural entry point. Its relevance depends, of course, on the focus we want to put on meaning: as related to thought, to communication, to truth, etc. In this paper, we concentrate on the model theoretic view of meaning, in particular via first-order logic representation. This view is commonly referred to...

Ectotherms have close physiological ties with the thermal environment; consequently, the impact of future climate change on their biogeographic distributions is of major interest. Here, we use the modern and deep-time fossil record of testudines (turtles, tortoises, and terrapins) to provide the first test of climate on the niche limits of both extant and extinct (Late Cretaceous, Maastrichtian...

This working note provides a basic overview of discounting in the context of climate change policy. After defining the social discount factor and social discount rate in terms of shadow prices (section 2), and noting the limitations of cost-benefit analysis for climate change (section 3), the determination of efficient social discount rates is discussed given: the impact of uncertainty about fu...

Modelling strategies for predicting the potential impacts of climate change on the natural distribution of species have often focused on the characterization of a species’ bioclimate envelope. A number of recent critiques have questioned the validity of this approach by pointing to the many factors other than climate that play an important part in determining species distributions and the dynam...