Increasing Australian bush-fire frequencies over the last decade has indicated a major climatic change in coming future. Understanding such climatic change for Australian bush-fire is limited and there is an urgent need of scientific research, which is capable enough to contribute to Australian society. Frequency of bush-fire carries information on spatial, temporal and climatic aspects of bush...

The Indonesian island of Sulawesi harbors a highly endemic and diverse fauna sparking fascination since long before Wallace's contemplation of biogeographical patterns in the region. Allopatric diversification driven by geological or climatic processes has been identified as the main mechanism shaping present faunal distribution on the island. There is both consensus and conflict among range pa...

Paleoclimatic time series are often unevenly spaced in time, making it difficult to obtain an accurate estimate of their red-noise spectrum. A Fortran 90 program (REDFIT) is presented that overcomes this problem by fitting a first-order autoregressive (AR1) process, being characteristic for many climatic processes, directly to unevenly spaced time series. Hence, interpolation in the time domain...

For the last two decades, climatically based interpretations have been the major focus in evolutionary studies of dryland alluvial fans. Climatic hypotheses to explain the development of alluvial fans in southern Death Valley, however, do not fare well when they are assessed with criteria used by philosophers of science. First and foremost, dating techniques do not have the chronometric precisi...

Despite considerable interest in recent years on species distribution modeling and phylogenetic niche conservatism, little is known about the way in which climatic niches change over evolutionary time. This knowledge is of major importance to understand the mechanisms underlying limits of species distributions, as well as to infer how different lineages might be affected by anthropogenic climat...

The evolution of climatic niche specialization has important implications for many topics in ecology, evolution and conservation. The climatic niche reflects the set of temperature and precipitation conditions where a species can occur. Thus, specialization to a limited set of climatic conditions can be important for understanding patterns of biogeography, species richness, community structure,...