Climatic variability and unpredictability affect the distribution and abundance of resources and the timing and duration of breeding opportunities. In vertebrates, climatic variability selects for enhanced cognition when organisms compensate for environmental changes through learning and innovation. This hypothesis is supported by larger brain sizes, higher foraging innovation rates, higher rep...

In order to develop adequate adaptation measures for environmental vulnerability, we need detailed knowledge on the climatic performance of forest ecosystems. In this study, we aim to explore climate function variability of lowland beech forest distribution at a landscape scale. We also construct the response profiles of these forests near their xeric limit under wet continental climatic condit...

This article applies formal detection and attribution techniques to investigate the nature of observed shifts in the timing of streamflow in the western United States. Previous studies have shown that the snow hydrology of the western United States has changed in the second half of the twentieth century. Such changes manifest themselves in the form of more rain and less snow, in reductions in t...

Models capturing the full effects of weather conditions on animal populations are scarce. Here we decompose yearly temperature and rainfall into mean trends, yearly amplitude of change and residual variation, using daily records. We establish from multi-model inference procedures, based on 1125 life histories (from 1987 to 2008), that European badger (Meles meles) annual mortality and recruitme...

This paper investigated the response of major food crop yields namely beans,cassava, Irish potatoes, maize and sweet potatoes to ongoing changes in climate inRwanda. The projected daily precipitation and temperature data for the period2000-2050 used in this study were generated by stochastic weather generator(LARS-WG) from daily raw data for the period 1961 -2000. These data werecollected from ...

Climate variability and changes are the emerging challenges for Indian agriculture with the growing population to ensure national food security. A study was conducted to assess the Climatic Change effects in medium to low altitude areas of the Himalayan region causing changes in land use and cereal crop productivity with the various climatic parameters. The rainfall and temperature changes from...

A crop can be represented as a biotechnical system in which components are either chosen (cultivar, management) or given (soil, climate) and whose combination generates highly variable stress patterns and yield responses. Here, we used modeling and simulation to predict the crop phenotypic plasticity resulting from the interaction of plant traits (G), climatic variability (E) and management act...

This report concerns a study which was conducted for SKB. The conclusions and viewpoints presented in the report are those of the authors and do not necessarily coincide with those of the client. Summary Knowledge about climatic variations is essential for SKB in its safety assessments of a geological repository for spent nuclear waste. There is therefore a need for information about possible f...

The African Sahel has been a very controversial region in the climatic change debate during the last decades. From the studies that announced a dramatic advance of the desert in the 1970s [Lamprey 1975] and lead to the first conference about desertification [Nairobi, 1977] to the hopeful articles assuming a global recovery from the great droughts of the 70s and 80s [Prince et al., 1998; Hermann...