Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Climate
Species- and community-level demographic responses of saplings to drought during tropical secondary succession
Published: 2024-06-01
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Forest Biology, Plant Biology, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Naturally regenerating secondary vegetation dominates the tropical forest landscapes, showing a remarkable capacity to sequester carbon, but such a role is threatened by increasing drought predicted with climate change. To understand how secondary forest species and communities respond to drought, we leverage a long-term chronosequence of tropical successional forests from Central Panama that [...]
Solving the “small outbreak problem” in climate epidemiology
Published: 2024-01-04
Subjects: Climate, Diseases, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Environmental Public Health, Epidemiology, Life Sciences, Microbiology, Parasitic Diseases, Public Health, Virus Diseases
Climate change can cause outbreaks of infectious diseases in unfamiliar locations — but how do we know which unusual outbreaks are the result of climate change? Scientists often hesitate to guess, leaving the task to journalists or the public. All of these audiences would benefit from a clear and consistent framework for thinking about causality, especially in situations where outbreaks are too [...]
A Perspective on How Glyphosate and 2,4-D May Impact Climate Change
Published: 2023-08-26
Subjects: Biogeochemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
An increase in herbicide use is occurring due to a growing population and herbicide-resistant crops in agriculture, which has resulted in more herbicide tolerant target species. Glyphosate and 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) are two of the most commonly used herbicides worldwide and are more recently being used in combination in pre-mixed commercial formulas. Subsequently, herbicide [...]
Biodiversity promotes resistance but dominant species shape recovery of grasslands under extreme drought
Published: 2023-05-18
Subjects: Biodiversity, Climate, Life Sciences
1. How biodiversity underpins ecosystem resistance (i.e., ability to withstand environmental perturbations) and recovery (i.e., ability to return to a pre-perturbation state) and thus stability under extreme climatic events is a timely question in ecology. To date, most studies have focused on the role of taxonomic diversity, neglecting how community functional composition and diversity beget [...]
Warming in the upper San Francisco Estuary: Patterns of water temperature change from 5 decades of data
Published: 2021-04-30
Subjects: Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Fresh Water Studies, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecology
Temperature is a key controlling variable from subcellular to ecosystem scales. Thus, climatic warming is expected to have broad impacts, especially in economically and ecologically valuable systems such as estuaries. The heavily managed upper San Francisco Estuary supplies water to millions of people and is home to fish species of high conservation, commercial, and recreational interest. Despite [...]
Global maps of soil temperature
Published: 2021-03-21
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Soil Science
Research in global change ecology relies heavily on global climatic grids derived from estimates of air temperature in open areas at around 2 m above the ground. These climatic grids thus fail to reflect conditions below vegetation canopies and near the ground surface, where critical ecosystem functions are controlled and most terrestrial species reside. Here we provide global maps of soil [...]