This study attempts to quantify the relative contributions of vegetation greening in China due to climatic and human influences from multiple observational datasets. Satellite measured vegetation greenness, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and relevant climate, land cover, and socioeconomic data since 1982 are analyzed using a multiple linear regression (MLR) method. A statistical...

Although climatic forcing has been suspected to be the most common cause of spatial population synchrony owing to the Moran effect, it has proved difficult to disentangle the impact of climate from other possible causes of synchrony based on population survey data. Nonlinear population responses to climatic variation may be a part of this difficulty, but they can also provide an opportunity to ...

BACKGROUND Climatic change is expected to lead to changes in species' geographical ranges. Adaptation strategies for biodiversity conservation require quantitative estimates of the magnitude, direction and rates of these potential changes. Such estimates are of greatest value when they are made for large ensembles of species and for extensive (sub-continental or continental) regions. METHODOL...

Farmers in semi-arid Zimbabwe prioritise climate variability as their major agricultural productivity-reducing problem. This paper raises the importance of considering local farmers’ perceptions on climate risk, as this greatly influences on-farm investments and decision-making in agricultural management and production in semiarid Zimbabwe. A study was conducted in two districts of semi-arid Zi...

Understanding the impact of past climatic events on the demographic history of extant species is critical for predicting species' responses to future climate change. Palaeoclimatic instability is a major mechanism of lineage diversification in taxa with low dispersal and small geographical ranges in tropical ecosystems. However, the impact of these climatic events remains questionable for the d...

Phenotypes, DNA, and measures of ecological differences are widely used in species delimitation. Although rarely defined in such studies, ecological divergence is almost always approximated using multivariate climatic data associated with sets of specimens (i.e., the "climatic niche"); the justification for this approach is that species-specific climatic envelopes act as surrogates for physiolo...

Identification of homogeneous invariant geographical units assumes considerable importance in the context of current attempts at developing environmental indices to monitor changes. Data on the edaphic and climatic parameters for the state of Gujarat--a predominantly arid to semi-arid province in western India--has been used to elaborate an approach that employs principal component analysis (PC...

Dacryodes edulis is a fruit tree growing naturally in the rainforests of Central Africa. To provide data to scientists and forest managers for the habitat of D. edulis in the wild, the study of ecological niche and environmental adaptation was carried out. The geographical coordinates of 168 collections of wild individuals and 19 climatic parameters were treated under Geographical Information S...