Forest types are generally identified using vegetation or land-use types. However, classifications less frequently consider the actual forest attributes within each type. To address this in an objective way across different regions and to link with their climate, we aimed improve distribution of be more realistic useful for biodiversity preservation, management, ecological forestry research. Th...

Surface climate data undergo processing to remove non-climatic effects such as urbanization and measurement irregularities. Some studies have shown that the processing is inadequate, leaving a residual warm bias. This has been disputed on three grounds: spatial autocorrelation of the 2 temperature field undermines significance of test results; counterfactual experiments using model-generated da...

The rate of climatic-niche evolution is important to many research areas in ecology, evolution, and conservation biology, including responses of species to global climate change, spread of invasive species, speciation, biogeography, and patterns of species richness. Previous studies have implied that clades with higher rates of climatic-niche evolution among species should have species with nar...

Climatic conditions shift gradually over millennia, altering the rates at which carbon (C) is fixed from the atmosphere and stored in the soil. However, legacy impacts of past climates on current soil C stocks are poorly understood. We used data from more than 5000 terrestrial sites from three global and regional data sets to identify the relative importance of current and past (Last Glacial Ma...

Climatic niche models for invasive plants are usually constructed with occurrence records taken from literature and collections. Because these data neither discriminate among life-cycle stages of plants (adult or juvenile) nor the origin of individuals (naturally established or man-planted), the resulting models may mispredict the distribution ranges of these species. We propose that more accur...

The extent to which species' life histories evolve to match climatic conditions is a critical question in evolutionary biology and ecology and as human activities rapidly modify global climate. GIS-based climatic data offer new opportunities to rigorously test this question. Superficially, the spadefoot toads of North America (Scaphiopodidae) seem to offer a classic example of adaptive life-his...

There is compelling evidence from glacial and interglacial periods of the Quaternary of the utilization of microrefugia. Microrefugia are sites that support locally favorable climates amidst unfavorable regional climates, which allow populations of species to persist outside of their main distributions. Knowledge of the location of microrefugia has important implications for climate change rese...

Over the last 20 years, climate models have been developed to an impressive level of complexity. They are core tools in the study of the interactions of many climatic processes and justifiably provide an additional strand in the argument that anthropogenic climate change is a critical global problem. Over a similar period, there has been growing interest in the interpretation and probabilistic ...

Land suitability analysis is a prerequisite to achieving optimum utilization of the available land resources. Lack of knowledge on best combination of factors that suit production of rice has contributed to the low production. The aim of this study was to develop a suitability map for rice crop based on physical and climatic factors of production using a Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) & GIS ap...