Multidecadal drought periods in the North American Southwest (258–42.58N, 1258–1058W), so-called megadroughts, are a prominent feature of the paleoclimate record over the last millennium (LM). Six forced transient simulations of theLMalongwith corresponding historical (1850–2005) and 500-yr preindustrial control runs from phase 5 of theCoupledModel Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) are analyzed t...

Flowering phenology is an important and poorly understood plant trait that may possibly be related to the invasiveness potential of alien species. The present work evaluates whether flowering time of invasive alien species is a key trait to overcome the climatic filters operating in continental Mediterranean ecosystems of Spain (characterised by summer drought and low temperatures in winter). W...

Despite considerable increased pesticide use over the past decades, little research has been done into their fate and effects in surface waters in tropical regions. In the present review, possible differences in response between temperate and tropical freshwaters to pesticide stress are discussed. Three underlying mechanisms for these differences are distinguished: (1) climate related parameter...

HEPATIC MANIFESTATIONS OF TROPICAL DISEASES ‘Tropical diseases’ are the diseases that are prevalent in or are unique to tropical and subtropical regions. The tropical areas, which lie in the zone between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, have a hot climate all the year and have larger volume of rains, which forms an ideal breeding ground for a large number of insect vectors and ...

Forest models can be useful tools to improve our understanding of forest dynamics and to evaluate potential impacts of climate change. There is an ongoing debate how drought events influence the dynamics of tropical forests. In this study, we explored the role of changes in precipitation on tropical forests in Madagascar. Therefore, we derived a new parameterization of the process-based forest ...

Considerable uncertainty surrounds the impacts of anthropogenic climate change on the composition and structure of Amazon forests. Building upon results from two large-scale ecosystem drought experiments in the eastern Brazilian Amazon that observed increases in mortality rates among some tree species but not others, in this study we investigate the physiological traits underpinning these diffe...

Amazon forests represent nearly half of all tropical vegetation biomass and, through photosynthesis and respiration, annually process more than twice the amount of estimated carbon (CO2) from fossil fuel emissions. Yet the seasonality of Amazon canopy cover, and the extent to which seasonal fluctuations in water availability and photosynthetically available radiation influence these processes, ...

The atmospheric and oceanic causes of North American droughts are examined using observations and ensemble climate simulations. The models indicate that oceanic forcing of annual mean precipitation variability accounts for up to 40% of total variance in northeastern Mexico, the southern Great Plains, and the Gulf Coast states but less than 10% in central and eastern Canada. Observations and mod...

Tropical climate is rapidly changing, but the effects of these changes on the geosphere are unknown, despite a likelihood of climatically-induced changes on weathering and erosion. The lack of long, continuous paleo-records prevents an examination of terrestrial responses to climate change with sufficient detail to answer questions about how systems behaved in the past and may alter in the futu...