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This paper introduces a modification to the Penman–Monteith equation—for net evapotranspiration—to account for vegetation under elevated atmospheric CO2. In so doing it reconciles contradictions between drought indices and modelled runoff projections.
Nearly two decades of data from a boreal forest soil warming experiment (+5 °C) show no significant increase in aboveground biomass accumulation beyond an initial transitory response.
The increasing frequency of marine heatwaves suggests that the impacts of successive events may be influenced by previous events. The extent of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef shows that ecological memory played a role in the impacts of the second heatwave.
Ice loss from Antarctica contributes to global sea-level rise. Analysis of ice core records and reanalysis datasets reveals that increased snowfall over the Antarctic Ice Sheet has offset contemporary sea-level rise by ~10 mm since 1901.
Rising pre-season daytime and night-time temperatures have contrasting effects on the timing of autumn-leaf senescence date in the Northern Hemisphere. Diurnal differences in drought stress may be the underlying mechanism.
A global experiment using model caterpillars shows that climate explains patterns of predation better than latitude or elevation alone. Predation pressure is found to be greater under higher temperatures and more stable climatic conditions.
Corporations are an important source of GHG emissions and an important climate-mitigation actor. An assessment of corporate climate action and systematic benchmarking against international targets is conducted for 138 companies in high-emitting sectors.
Model simulations with CO2 forcing prescribed in discrete geographical regions reveal that polar amplification arises primarily due to local lapse-rate feedback, with ice-albedo and Planck feedbacks playing subsidiary roles.
Ocean acidification will result in biological winners and losers. A mesocosm experiment shows that a toxic algal species is a winner under ocean acidification, with implications for the marine food web and, more generally, ecosystem services.
During periods of photosynthetic inactivity, roots compete for nutrients with microbes and abiotic processes. Most ESMs neglect this competition, leading to large positive biases in annual N leaching and N2O emissions estimates.
Projected sea-level rise and increased flooding threaten coastal agriculture. Gradual increases in soil salinity, but not inundation alone, are shown to correspond to increasing diversification into aquaculture and higher levels of internal migration.
The impact of coral bleaching and mortality is found to reduce aggression in resident butterflyfish. This is linked to the lower dietary percentage of preferred food, nutritionally rich Acropora coral, with a less nutritious diet influencing aggressive behaviour.
Climate and land-cover change can affect the summer and winter ranges and migration distances of migratory birds. Accounting for all of these factors, rather than just summer range as is typical, significantly increases the number of species under threat.
Arctic biodiversity patterns will be highly dependent on the evolution of snow conditions, according to simulation results that integrate observations of vascular plants, mosses and lichens over a range of Arctic landscapes.
Vegetation in the Windmill Islands, East Antarctica, is changing rapidly in response to a drying climate. Mosses provide potentially important indicators of coastal climate change in the region.
Deep reefs and their inhabitants are diverse, but environmental change, in particular warming, will cause these reefs found along southeastern Australia to tropicalize with different responses across functional groups, resulting in novel communities by the 2060s.
Soil microbial activity is accelerated by warming and does not acclimate over periods of at least 50 years. Resulting soil carbon loss is nevertheless temporary because substrate depletion reduces microbial biomass and constrains the influence of microbes over the ecosystem.
Global ocean oxygen concentrations have been declining, with rates varying regionally. The retreat of the Labrador Current, allowing more low-oxygen subtropical waters to the coastal and shelf waters, drives the rapid decline observed in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.
The period 1982 to 2012 has seen a 16% decline in the area of vegetation limited by temperature. This rapid observed and expected decline in temperature limitation will facilitate further global greening subject to other limitations to growth in cold regions.
River floods have severe socio-economic impacts. A multi-model framework reveals river-flood-related human losses may rise by up to 83%, 134% and 265% at 1.5 °C, 2 °C and 3 °C warming, respectively, with economic losses also projected to rise.