Fire has been an important part of the Earth system for over 350 Myr. Humans evolved in this fiery world and are the only animals to have used and controlled fire. The interaction of mankind with fire is a complex one, with both positive and negative aspects. Humans have long used fire for heating, cooking, landscape management and agriculture, as well as for pyrotechnologies and in industrial ...

Exposures to dangerously high temperatures are a public health threat expected to increase with global climate change. Heat waves exacerbate the risks associated with heat exposure, and urban residents are particularly vulnerable to threats of heat waves due to the urban heat island effect. To understand how heat waves are changing over time, we examine changes in four heat wave characteristics...

The speed at which biological range expansions occur has important consequences for the conservation management of species experiencing climate change and for invasion by exotic organisms. Rates of dispersal and population growth are known to affect the speed of invasion, but little is known about the effect of having a community of dispersal phenotypes on the rate of range expansion. We use re...

Palms are keystone species in tropical ecosystems and provide essential ecosystem services to rural people worldwide. However, many palm species are threatened by habitat loss and over-exploitation. Furthermore, palms are sensitive to climate and thus vulnerable to future climate changes. Here, we provide a first quantitative assessment of the future risks to the African palm flora, finding tha...

Climate forcing has been suggested as a possible explanation for dispersal/extinction of hominins in the Southern Levant during the Middle Paleolithic (MP). Evidence from fauna has produced ambiguous results, suggesting that inter-site variation in Last Glacial faunas reflect spatial differences within the region. This study presents a multivariate approach to test the effect of climate change ...

The lack of objective tree species lists hinders the assessment of climate change effects on tree species distributions. The goal of this studywas to develop and evaluate criteria for selecting tree species used in large-scale tree migration monitoring efforts. The results of this study indicate that tree migration conclusions are highly dependant on the species selected for examination. It was...

Global change affects individual phenotypes and biotic interactions, which can have cascading effects up to the ecosystem level. However, the role of environmentally induced phenotypic plasticity in species interactions is poorly understood, leaving a substantial gap in our knowledge of the impacts of global change on ecosystems. Using a cladoceran-dragonfly system, we experimentally investigat...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that climate change will induce considerable environmental degradation globally during this century. What are the implications of this prediction for the patterns of population migration and political conflict? Climate change is an evolving environmental phenomenon whose effects are not yet fully manifested. This paper strives to gain insig...

Temporal asymmetry in patterns of regional climate change may jeopardize the match between the proximate and ultimate cues of the timing of breeding. The consequences on short- and long-term population dynamics and trends as well as the underlying mechanisms are, however, often unknown. Using long-term data from Finland, we demonstrate that black grouse (Tetrao tetrix) have responded to spring ...

A persistent debate in population ecology concerns the relative importance of environmental stochasticity and density dependence in determining variability in adult year-class strength, which contributes to future reproduction as well as potential yield in exploited populations. Apart from the strength of the processes, the timing of density regulation may affect how stochastic variation, for i...