Search results for "Climate change"
showing 10 items of 1151 documents
Modelling forest decline using SMOS soil moisture and vegetation optical depth
2018
Global change is increasing the risk of forest decline worldwide, impacting carbon and water cycles. Hence, there is an urgent need for predicting forest decline occurrence. To that purpose, this study links forest decline events in Catalonia, detected by the DEBOSCAT forest monitoring program, with information from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite. Firstly, this study reviews the role of the SMOS soil moisture in a previous forest decline episode occurred in 2012, where the authors concluded that dry soils increased the probability of observing decline in broadleaved forests. Secondly, the present study detects that forest decline in 2012 and 2016 was linked to very dr…
Local temperatures inferred from plant communities suggest strong spatial buffering of climate warming across Northern Europe
2013
Recent studies from mountainous areas of small spatial extent (2500 km(2) ) suggest that fine-grained thermal variability over tens or hundreds of metres exceeds much of the climate warming expected for the coming decades. Such variability in temperature provides buffering to mitigate climate-change impacts. Is this local spatial buffering restricted to topographically complex terrains? To answer this, we here study fine-grained thermal variability across a 2500-km wide latitudinal gradient in Northern Europe encompassing a large array of topographic complexities. We first combined plant community data, Ellenberg temperature indicator values, locally measured temperatures (LmT) and globally…
Patterns of drought tolerance in major European temperate forest trees: climatic drivers and levels of variability
2013
The future performance of native tree species under climate change conditions is frequently discussed, since increasingly severe and more frequent drought events are expected to become a major risk for forest ecosystems. To improve our understanding of the drought tolerance of the three common European temperate forest tree species Norway spruce, silver fir and common beech, we tested the influence of climate and tree-specific traits on the inter and intrasite variability in drought responses of these species. Basal area increment data from a large tree-ring network in Southern Germany and Alpine Austria along a climatic cline from warm-dry to cool-wet conditions were used to calculate indi…
Non‐linearity in interspecific interactions in response to climate change: cod and haddock as an example
2020
Climate change has profound ecological effects, yet our understanding of how trophic interactions among species are affected by climate change is still patchy. The sympatric Atlantic haddock and cod are co-occurring across the North Atlantic. They compete for food at younger stages and thereafter the former is preyed by the latter. Climate change might affect the interaction and coexistence of these two species. Particularly, the increase in sea temperature (ST) has been shown to affect distribution, population growth and trophic interactions in marine systems. We used 33-year long time series of haddock and cod abundances estimates from two data sources (acoustic and trawl survey) to analy…
Rising temperature modulates pH niches of fen species
2021
Rising temperatures may endanger fragile ecosystems because their character and key species show different habitat affinities under different climates. This assumption has only been tested in limited geographical scales. In fens, one of the most endangered ecosystems in Europe, broader pH niches have been reported from cold areas and are expected for colder past periods. We used the largest European-scale vegetation database from fens to test the hypothesis that pH interacts with macroclimate temperature in forming realized niches of fen moss and vascular plant species. We calibrated the data set (29,885 plots after heterogeneity-constrained resampling) with temperature, using two macroclim…
Environmental sensitivity of Neogoniolithon Brassica-Florida associated with vermetid reefs in the Mediterranean Sea
2016
Vermetid reefs in the Mediterranean Sea are increasingly affected by both anthropogenic actions and global climate change, which are putting this coastal ecosystem at risk. The main species involved in building these reefs are two species of intertidal vermetid gastropods and the crustose calcareous alga, Neogoniolithon brassica-florida, which cements the gastropod shells and thus solidifying the reef edges. In the present study, we examined the pattern of distribution in the field and the environmental sensitivity (thermal tolerance, resilience to low pH, high light intensity and desiccation) of N. brassica-florida along the coasts of Sicily and Israel by means of chlorophyll fluorescence …
Invertebrate communities of the High Arctic ponds in Hornsund
2016
How environmental conditions influence current distributions of organisms at the local scale in sensitive high Arctic freshwaters is essential to understand in order to better comprehend the cascading consequences of the ongoing climate change. This knowledge is also important background data for paleolimnological assessments of long-term limnoecological changes and in describing the range of environmental variability. We sampled five limnologically different freshwater sites from the Fuglebergsletta marine terrace in Hornsund, southern Svalbard, for aquatic invertebrates. The invertebrate communities were tested against non-climatic environmental drivers (limnological and catchment variabl…
Plasticity of response of tree-ring width of Scots pine provenances to weather extremes in Latvia
2019
Abstract Climatic changes and weather extremes are causing shifts in distribution of tree species, affecting productivity of forests. With the northwards advance of deciduous species in Northern Europe, Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) is predicted to decrease survival and productivity. Nevertheless, Scots pine have adapted to diverse environments, hence selection among its populations could be applied to sustain productivity of stands under changing climate. In this study, sensitivity of tree-ring width of Eastern European provenances of Scots pine differing by field performance (Dippoldiswalde, Eibenstock, Rytel, Gustrow, and Kalsnava) to weather extremes in three trials in Latvia (hemibo…
Ecological and climatological signals in tree-ring width and density chronologies along a latitudinal boreal transect
2016
ABSTRACTShifts in the climate sensitivity of trees throughout the twentieth century might indicate climate change effects in the boreal forest ecosystem. We here evaluated such potential changes by analyzing six tree-ring width (TRW) and maximum latewood density (MXD) chronologies from northern, central and southern boreal forests in Finland (60°N–69°N). Besides latitudinal effects, differing micro-sites (lakeshore and inland) were considered to evaluate the influence of ground water access on twentieth-century tree-ring formation and climate sensitivity. Overall, the boreal MXD chronologies appeared less affected by micro-site conditions compared to the TRW chronologies. Along the boreal t…
Changes of energy fluxes in marine animal forests of the anthropocene: Factors shaping the future seascape
2019
12 pages, 3 figures