This paper uses a palaeoecological approach to examine the impact of drier climatic conditions of the Early-Mid-Holocene (ca 8000-4000 years ago) upon Amazonia's forests and their fire regimes. Palaeovegetation (pollen data) and palaeofire (charcoal) records are synthesized from 20 sites within the present tropical forest biome, and the underlying causes of any emergent patterns or changes are ...

Climate is a driver of biotic systems. It affects individual fitness, population dynamics, distribution and abundance of species, and ecosystem structure and function. Regional variation in climatic regimes creates selective pressures for the evolution of locally adapted physiologies, morphological adaptations (e.g., color patterns, surface textures, body shapes and sizes), and behavioral adapt...

Understanding how specific environmental factors shape gene flow while disentangling their importance relative to the effects of geographical isolation is a major question in evolutionary biology and a specific goal of landscape genetics. Here, we combine information from nuclear microsatellite markers and ecological niche modelling to study the association between climate and spatial genetic s...

76 JOURNAL OF NATURAL RESOURCES & LIFE SCIENCES EDUCATION VOLUME 36 2007 A working knowledge of climatic patterns and processes is an important tool for range managers in the southwestern United States. High variability in temperature and precipitation patterns require that climatic conditions be considered when implementing best management practices. It is widely accepted that the earth’s clim...

Leaffall phenology is an important periodical event in forests, contributing to mobilization of organic matter from primary producers to soil. For seasonal forests, leaffall periodicity has been related to rainfall regime and dry season length. In weakly seasonal forests, where there is no marked dry season, other climatic factors could trigger leaf shed. In this study, we aimed to determine if...

The relationship between microevolution and macroevolution is a central topic in evolutionary biology. An aspect of this relationship that remains very poorly studied in modern evolutionary biology is the relationship between within-species geographic variation and among-species patterns of trait variation. Here, we tested the relationship between climate and morphology among and within species...

We examined the effect of range size in commonly applied macroecological analyses using continental distribution data for all 550 Neotropical palm species (Arecaceae) at varying grain sizes from 0.58 to 58. First, we evaluated the relative contribution of range-restricted and widespread species on the patterns of species richness and endemism. Second, we analysed the impact of range size on the...

This study contributes to a better understanding of the spatial and temporal patterns of ecosystem dynamics in Southern Africa in response to climatic variability. First, we identified the areas where NDVI is covarying with precipitation, and where rainfall anomalies are correlated with NDVI anomalies. The results suggest that these correlations are related to quasi-periodicities in rainfall pa...

Methods Using neutral models and mid-domain effect models, we simulated species spread in a spatially explicit array of grid cells representing the Atlantic Forest domain. We compared empirical patterns of species richness and composition with predictions of the neutral and mid-domain effect models. We also modeled individual species responses to climatic conditions and forest integrity, a meas...

Urbanization profoundly alters biological systems; yet the predictability of responses to urbanization based on key biological traits, the repeatability of these patterns among cities, and how the impact of urbanization on biological systems varies as a function of background climatic conditions remain unknown. We use insects as a focal system to review the major patterns of responses to urbani...