Many studies show that species richness is correlated with climate, especially among local sites within a region. However, few studies have addressed how these climate– diversity relationships actually arise. Only a few processes can directly change species richness (i.e., speciation, extinction, dispersal), and these processes may be best studied by incorporating a phylogenetic perspective. He...

BACKGROUND Although some authors have suggested that there is some seasonal periodicity of hemoptysis, or relation to respiratory tract infections, the association of influenza or climatic parameters with hemoptysis has been poorly investigated. Our aim was to describe the relationship between influenza and climatic parameters with severe hemoptysis that required bronchial artery embolization (...

Linear equatorial wave theory (Matsuno, 1966) has shown that equatorially trapped waves (particularly Rossby and Kelvin waves) are important waves in determining large scale climatic processes such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO; e.g. Philander, 1990; Clarke, 2008). Other factors that determine properties like ENSO periodicity and strength are stochastic processes (Kleeman, 2008). Th...

Significant changes in population and cultivation of farmland in Western U.S. over the past 200 years has required the use of extensive irrigation to sustain crop growth in the region. This irrigation has altered the land surface processes in the region and subsequently the local climates by increasing soil moisture levels higher than they naturally would be if no irrigation had taken place. An...

During the last two decades, forest condition in Germany and in some other parts of Europe has stabilized,1 because the emission of harmful pollutants and their deposition in the forests was lowered substantially.2 The still enduring deposition of nitrogen compounds in a typical size between 16 and 20 kg/(ha*a) in German forests exceeds natural levels and must be evaluated as a potential danger...

Regimes and regime shifts are potentially important concepts for understanding decadal variability in the physical system of the North Pacific because of the potential for an ecosystem to reorganize itself in response to such shifts. There are two prevalent senses in which these concepts are taken in the literature. The first is a formal definition and posits multiple stable states and rapid tr...

How do the feedbacks between tectonics, sediment transport and climate work to shape the topographic evolution of the Earth? This question has been widely addressed via numerical models constrained with thermochronological and geomorphological data at scales ranging from local to orogenic. Here we present a novel numerical model that aims at reproducing the interaction between these processes a...

The previous chapter considered how short-term variations in climatic conditions and extreme weather events can exert direct effects on human death rates, physical injury, mental health and other health outcomes. Changes in mean climatic conditions and climate variability also can affect human health via indirect pathways, particularly via changes in biological and ecological processes that inf...

Species' geographic ranges could primarily be physiological tolerances drawn in space. Alternatively, geographic ranges could be only broadly constrained by physiological climatic tolerances: there could generally be much more proximate constraints on species' ranges (dispersal limitation, biotic interactions, etc.) such that species often occupy a small and unpredictable subset of tolerable cl...