Climate change in the past has led to significant changes in species' distributions. However, how individual species respond to climate change depends largely on their adaptations and environmental tolerances. In the Quaternary, temperate-adapted taxa are in general confined to refugia during glacials while cold-adapted taxa are in refugia during interglacials. In the Northern Hemisphere, evide...

Amphibians are the most threatened vertebrates today, experiencing worldwide declines. In recent years considerable effort was invested in exposing the causes of these declines. Climate change has been identified as such a cause; however, the expectable effects of predicted milder, shorter winters on hibernation success of temperate-zone Amphibians have remained controversial, mainly due to a l...

Crops that are not part of the customary diet of the local population and grown primarily for their high cash values and export potentials are categorized as nontraditional. Recently, several African countries have gone into the production of nontraditional fruits and vegetables of temperate origin in order to diversify their agricultural exports and increase hard currency earning. Most develop...

Whether movement will enable organisms to alleviate thermal stress is central to the biodiversity implications of climate change. We use the temperature-dependence of ectotherm performance to investigate the fitness consequences of movement. Movement to an optimal location within a 50 km radius will only offset the fitness impacts of climate change by 2100 in 5 per cent of locations globally. R...

This paper examines climate change impacts on South American agriculture using a set of Ricardian regressions estimated across different samples of farms in South America. Regressions are run for the whole sample and for subsamples of crop-only, mixed, and livestock-only farms. The results indicate that climate sensitivity varies a great deal across each type of farm. The analysis also reveals ...

There is growing scientific evidence of climate change at the Earth’s poles but also increasing worries that most people, living in more temperate latitudes, are failing to grasp the significance of these events. And it is not just scientists that are worried by this perception gap: many artists are also concerned about the apparent failure to grab public attention over these issues. A new exhi...

Increased tree growth in temperate and boreal forests has been proposed as a direct consequence of a warming climate. Acid deposition effects on nutrient availability may influence the climate dependency of tree growth, however. This study presents an analysis of archived soil samples that has enabled changes in soil chemistry to be tracked with patterns of tree growth through the 20th century....

Climatic selective pressures are thought to dominate biotic selective pressures at higher latitudes. However, few studies have experimentally tested how these selective pressures differentially act on traits across latitudes because traits can rarely be manipulated independently of the organism in nature. We overcame this challenge by using an extended phenotype-active bird nests-and conducted ...

the assessment of the thermal bioclimate is based on the human energy balance and derived indices such as Physiologically equivalent temperature (Pet) or Universal thermal Climate index (UtCi). these two indices were compared over a period of ten year based on hourly data in a middle european city with a temperate climate. the analysis performed shows that the differences obtained result from t...

This paper challenges the hypothesis that negative yield effects in key temperate grain producing regions of the world resulting from global climate change would have a serious impact on world food production. Model results demonstrate that even with concurrent productivity losses in the major grain producing regions of the world, global warming will not seriously disrupt world agricultural mar...