Dengue and malaria are vector-borne diseases and major public health problems worldwide. Changes in climatic factors influence incidences of these diseases. The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between vector-borne disease incidences and meteorological data, and hence to predict disease risk in a global outreach tourist setting. The retrospective data of dengue and ma...

A major goal of ecology is to explain differences in species richness between regions and among clades. The diversification rate of clades is a key parameter for understanding both patterns. Here, we combine phylogenetic and climatic data for 250 species of plethodontid salamanders and show for the first time that rapid species diversification is associated with accelerated climatic-niche evolu...

A procedure is outlined for distinguishing among competing hypotheses for fossil morphology and then used to evaluate current views on the meaning of Neandertal skeletal morphology. Three explanations have dominated debates about the meaning of Neandertal cranial features: climatic adaptation, anterior dental loading, and genetic drift. Neither climatic adaptation nor anterior dental loading ar...

Aim Patterns of species richness are often closely linked with climate, but the specific mechanisms by which species’ climatic niches underlie large-scale richness patterns remain poorly understood. It has been hypothesized that reduced temperature seasonality in the tropics promotes the evolution of species with narrow temperature niche breadths, and that this hypothesis helps explain high tro...

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 ...

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...