In recent decades, intense droughts, insect outbreaks, and wildfires have led to decreasing tree growth and increasing mortality in many temperate forests. We compared annual tree-ring width data from 1,097 populations in the coterminous United States to climate data and evaluated site-specific tree responses to climate variations throughout the 20th century. For each population, we developed a...

Water-use efficiency (WUE), defined as the ratio of net primary productivity (NPP) to evapotranspiration (ET), is an important indicator to represent the trade-off pattern between vegetation productivity and water consumption. Its dynamics under climate change are important to ecohydrology and ecosystem management, especially in the drylands. In this study, we modified and used a late version o...

Many temperate European tree species have their southernmost distribution limits in the Mediterranean Basin. The projected climatic conditions, particularly an increase in dryness, might induce an altitudinal and latitudinal retreat at their southernmost distribution limit. Therefore, characterizing the morphological and physiological variability of temperate tree species under dry conditions i...

Mars' wet-to-dry transition is a major environmental catastrophe, yet the spatial pattern, tempo, and cause of drying are poorly constrained. We built globally-distributed database constraints on Mars late-stage paleolake size relative to catchment area (aridity index), found evidence for climate zonation as was out. Aridity increased over time in southern midlatitude highlands, where lakes bec...

Plant species in dryland ecosystems are limited by water availability and may be vulnerable to increases in aridity. Methods are needed to monitor and assess the rate of change in plant abundance and composition in relation to climate, understand the potential for degradation in dryland ecosystems, and forecast future changes in plant species assemblages. I employ nearly a century of vegetation...

There is currently no consensus on the importance of climate change in Mesoamerican prehistory. Some invoke drought as a causal factor in major cultural transitions, including the abandonment of many sites at 900 CE, while others conclude that cultural factors were more important. This lack of agreement reflects the fact that the history of climate change in many regions of Mesoamerica is poorl...

Due to the different degrees of controls exerted by biological and geochemical processes, climate changes are suggested to uncouple biogeochemical C, N and P cycles, influencing biomass accumulation, decomposition and storage in terrestrial ecosystems. However, the possible extent of such disruption in grassland ecosystems remains unclear, especially in China's steppes which have undergone rapi...

Environmental theories of African faunal evolution state that important evolutionary changes during the Pliocene^ Pleistocene interval (the last ca. 5.3 million years) were mediated by changes in African climate or shifts in climate variability. Marine sediment sequences demonstrate that subtropical African climate periodically oscillated between markedly wetter and drier conditions, paced by e...

In consideration of the steady entanglements of viticulture with the environmental features – including climate – it is of concern to project which climatic conditions an area is expected to face in a changing climate scenario. A quantitative approach helps in assessing class shift in climate classification; both “generic” climatic and bioclimatic indices were considered in this study, namely: ...