Analyses of how organisms are likely to respond to a changing climate have focused largely on the direct effects of warming temperatures, though changes in other variables may also be important, particularly the amount and timing of precipitation. Here, we develop a network of eight growth-increment width chronologies for freshwater mussel species in the Pacific Northwest, United States and int...

Biological carbon sequestration by forest ecosystems plays an important role in the net balance of greenhouse gases, acting as a carbon sink for anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about the abiotic environmental factors (including climate) that control carbon storage in temperate and boreal forests and consequently, about their potential response to climate ch...

US national parks are challenged by climate and other forms of broad-scale environmental change that operate beyond administrative boundaries and in some instances are occurring at especially rapid rates. Here, we evaluate the climate change exposure of 289 natural resource parks administered by the US National Park Service (NPS), and ask which are presently (past 10 to 30 years) experiencing e...

In this research, using technique for order-preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) index, drought phenomenon is determined and ranked. For this purpose, using 5 atmospheric elements including temperature, wind, precipitation days, annual precipitation, precipitation concentration index (PCI), droughts occurred in Shiraz station for 20-year statistical period (1983-2003) have been d...

This paper documents the main features of the weather, climate and climate variability over Andes cordillera in South America on the basis of instrumental observations. We first provide a basic physical understanding of the mean annual cycle of the atmospheric circulation and precipitation and over the Andes and adjacent lowlands. In particular, the diversity of precipitation, temperature and w...

We present the first synchronously coupled transient simulation of the evolution of the northern Africa climate-ecosystem for the last 6500 years in a global general circulation ocean–atmosphere–terrestrial ecosystem model. The model simulated the major abrupt vegetation collapse in the southern Sahara at about 5 ka, consistent with the proxy records. Local precipitation, however, shows a much ...

Climate, vegetation, and soil characteristics play important roles in regulating the spatial variation in carbon dioxide fluxes, but their relative influence is still uncertain. In this study, we compiled data from 241 eddy covariance flux sites in the Northern Hemisphere and used Classification and Regression Trees and Redundancy Analysis to assess how climate, vegetation, and soil affect the ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Little is known about health impacts of climate in pre-industrial societies. We used historical data to investigate the association of temperature and precipitation with total and age-specific mortality in Skellefteå, northern Sweden, between 1749 and 1859. METHODS We retrieved digitized aggregated population data of the Skellefteå parish, and monthly temperature and preci...