To identify countermeasures to the effects of climate warming on crop production, we mustunderstand the changes in crop phenology and the relationships between phenology and climatechange and cultivar. We used summer maize phenological and climate data in the North ChinaPlain, collected from 1981 to 2010. This study analyzed the spatiotemporal trends inphenological data and lengths of different...

With population growth, increasing water demands and climate change the need to understand the current and future pathways to water security is becoming more pressing. To contribute to addressing this challenge, we examine the link between water stress and society through socio-hydrological modeling. We conceptualize the interactions between an agricultural society with its environment in a sty...

Global trends including population growth, changing diets and consumption patterns, urbanisation and climate change will exert increasing pressure on supplies of food and other products of ecosystems. Many experts predict that food production will need to increase by up to 100 per cent over the next forty years and some suggest that this can only be achieved through intensification of current i...

Geological records on earth are largely set in stone, or at least the distinctive fossils to be found in different layers of rock. The geological time scale also tends to span millions of years though more recently they have comprised mere millennia, with the most recent epoch, the Holocene, traced back to have begun just 11,700 years ago at the end of the last ice age. But geologists are now c...

Montane regions worldwide have experienced relatively low plant invasion rates, a trend attributed to increased climatic severity, low rates of disturbance, and reduced propagule pressure relative to lowlands. Manipulative experiments at elevations above the invasive range of non-native species can clarify the relative contributions of these mechanisms to montane invasion resistance, yet such e...

Scirpophaga incertulas Walker is an important agricultural pest in Asia. Only few studies are available on its long-term population dynamics under climate warming. In this study, we used the linear and generalized additive models (GAMs) to analyze the historical dataset of >50 years on this pest at Xinfeng County of Jiangxi Province, China. The main objective of this study was to explore the ef...

Citation: Mesquita MdS, Erikstad KE, Sandvik H, Barrett RT, Reiertsen TK, Anker-Nilssen T, Hodges KI and Bader J (2015) There is more to climate than the North Atlantic Oscillation: a new perspective from climate dynamics to explain the variability in population growth rates of a long-lived seabird. Front. Ecol. Evol. 3:43. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2015.00043 There is more to climate than the North At...

Increases in the frequency, duration, and severity of regional drought pose major threats to the health and integrity of downstream ecosystems. During 2007-2008, the U.S. southeast experienced one of the most severe droughts on record. Drought and water withdrawals in the upstream watershed led to decreased freshwater input to Apalachicola Bay, Florida, an estuary that is home to a diversity of...

Recent dramatic increases in food prices in much of the world have caused much concern, and have even resulted in some public protests and riots. This is easy to understand given the large percentages of incomes that the poor devote to food purchases. Many commentators have predicted that food supplies in the Asia-Pacific region will become much more limited in the future as the result of popul...