In this paper, according to the data of 17 weather stations in Khuzestan during 1951–2012, the trend of climate changes and its severity were evaluated. A consistent correlation was highlighted for trends of De Martonne index as indicator of climate and temperature index in some stations. Based on the results of the temperature analysis, 88.31% of the Province became warmer, 6.3% became colder,...

Plants have evolved different strategies to cope with drought, involving alternative ecophysiologies and different levels of plasticity. These strategies are critical for species of limited distribution, which are especially vulnerable to the current rates of rapid environmental change. The aim of this study was to assess the water strategy of two species with limited distribution, Cneorum tric...

Evolutionary ecologists have long sought to understand the conditions under which perennial (iteroparous) versus annual (semelparous) plant life histories are favored. We evaluated the idea that aridity and variation in the length of droughts should favor the evolution of an annual life history, both by decreasing adult survival and by increasing the potential for high seedling survival via red...

BACKGROUND In the past few decades, global climate change has accentuated the intensification of aridization in South-Western Romania, with direct and indirect consequences on the quality of forest ecosystems. In addition to qualitative deterioration, the quantitative changes brought about by intensive anthropic deforestation have created the conditions for a decline in the size of forest areas...

California has experienced a dry 21(st) century capped by severe drought from 2012 through 2015 prompting questions about hydroclimatic sensitivity to anthropogenic climate change and implications for the future. We address these questions using a Holocene lake sediment record of hydrologic change from the Sierra Nevada Mountains coupled with marine sediment records from the Pacific. These data...

How anthropogenic climate change will affect hydroclimate in the arid regions of southwestern North America has implications for the allocation of water resources and the course of regional development. Here we show that there is a broad consensus among climate models that this region will dry in the 21st century and that the transition to a more arid climate should already be under way. If the...

This article reviews recent literature on drought of the last millennium, followed by an update on global aridity changes from 1950 to 2008. Projected future aridity is presented based on recent studies and our analysis of model simulations. Dry periods lasting for years to decades have occurred many times during the last millennium over, for example, North America, West Africa, and East Asia. ...

University House 1, PO Box 1700, STN CSC, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3R4 Phone: 250-721-6236 | Fax: 250-721-7217 | pacificclimate.org A recent paper by Aiguo Dai (2013) in Nature Climate Change concludes that observed decreases in precipitation and streamflow, as well as increases in drought in certain areas are consistent with model projections of severe1 w...

The role of climate and fire in the development, maintenance, and species composition of prairie in the eastern axis of the tallgrass Prairie Peninsula intrigued early North American ecologists. However, evaluation of the long-standing hypotheses about the region's environmental history has been hampered by the scarcity of paleorecords. We conducted multiproxy analyses on early and middle Holoc...

[1] We examine the response of summer precipitation to mid-Holocene insolation forcing and insolation-induced changes in sea surface temperature. Using a high-resolution nested climate modeling system, we find that mid-Holocene insolation forcing results in drier-than-present conditions over the central continental United States (U.S.) and northern Rocky Mountains, as well as wetter-than-presen...