Climate change impacts on high-elevation hydroelectricity in California

2014 ◽  
Vol 510 ◽  
pp. 153-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaveh Madani ◽  
Marion Guégan ◽  
Cintia B. Uvo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
High Elevation

Climate change impacts on two high-elevation hydropower systems in California

2011 ◽  
Vol 109 (S1) ◽  
pp. 151-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Vicuña ◽  
John A. Dracup ◽  
Larry Dale
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
High Elevation

scholarly journals Plague risk in the western United States over seven decades of environmental change

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin J Carlson ◽  
Sarah N Bevins ◽  
Boris V Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Infectious Disease ◽  
United States ◽  
Environmental Change ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Western United States ◽  
Small Subset ◽  
Wildlife Reservoirs ◽  
Rodent Communities

After several pandemics over the last two millennia, the wildlife reservoirs of plague (Yersinia pestis) now persist around the world, including in the western United States. Routine surveillance in this region has generated comprehensive records of human cases and animal seroprevalence, creating a unique opportunity to test how plague reservoirs are responding to environmental change. Here, we develop a new method to detect the signal of climate change in infectious disease distributions, and test whether plague reservoirs and spillover risk have shifted since 1950. We find that plague foci are associated with high-elevation rodent communities, and soil biochemistry may play a key role in the geography of long-term persistence. In addition, we find that human cases are concentrated only in a small subset of endemic areas, and that spillover events are driven by higher rodent species richness (the amplification hypothesis) and climatic anomalies (the trophic cascade hypothesis). Using our detection model, we find that due to the changing climate, rodent communities at high elevations have become more conducive to the establishment of plague reservoirs - with suitability increasing up to 40% in some places - and that spillover risk to humans at mid-elevations has increased as well, although more gradually. These results highlight opportunities for deeper investigation of plague ecology, the value of integrative surveillance for infectious disease geography, and the need for further research into ongoing climate change impacts.

scholarly journals Insects and recent climate change

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Halsch ◽  
Arthur M. Shapiro ◽  
James A. Fordyce ◽  
Chris C. Nice ◽  
James H. Thorne ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Natural World ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Population Declines ◽  
Climatic Fluctuations ◽  
Recent Climate Change ◽  
Recent Climate

AbstractInsects have diversified through 400 million years of Earth’s changeable climate, yet recent and ongoing shifts in patterns of temperature and precipitation pose novel challenges as they combine with decades of other anthropogenic stressors including the conversion and degradation of land. Here we consider how insects are responding to recent climate change, while summarizing the literature on long-term monitoring of insect populations in the context of climatic fluctuations. Results to date suggest that climate change impacts on insects have the potential to be considerable, even when compared to changes in land use. The importance of climate is illustrated with a case study from the butterflies of Northern California, where we find that population declines have been severe in high-elevation areas removed from the most immediate effects of habitat loss. These results shed light on the complexity of montane-adapted insects responding to changing abiotic conditions and raise questions about the utility of temperate mountains as refugia during the Anthropocene. We consider methodological issues that would improve syntheses of results across long-term insect datasets and highlight directions for future empirical work.Significance statementAnthropogenic climate change poses multiple threats to society and biodiversity, and challenges our understanding of the resilience of the natural world. We discuss recent ideas and evidence on this issue and conclude that the impacts of climate change on insects in particular have the potential to be more severe than might have been expected a decade ago. Finally, we suggest practical measures that include the protection of diverse portfolios of species, not just those inhabiting what are currently the most pristine areas.

scholarly journals Insects and recent climate change

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (2) ◽  
pp. e2002543117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Halsch ◽  
Arthur M. Shapiro ◽  
James A. Fordyce ◽  
Chris C. Nice ◽  
James H. Thorne ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Population Declines ◽  
Climatic Fluctuations ◽  
Temperature And Precipitation ◽  
Recent Climate Change ◽  
Recent Climate

Insects have diversified through more than 450 million y of Earth’s changeable climate, yet rapidly shifting patterns of temperature and precipitation now pose novel challenges as they combine with decades of other anthropogenic stressors including the conversion and degradation of land. Here, we consider how insects are responding to recent climate change while summarizing the literature on long-term monitoring of insect populations in the context of climatic fluctuations. Results to date suggest that climate change impacts on insects have the potential to be considerable, even when compared with changes in land use. The importance of climate is illustrated with a case study from the butterflies of Northern California, where we find that population declines have been severe in high-elevation areas removed from the most immediate effects of habitat loss. These results shed light on the complexity of montane-adapted insects responding to changing abiotic conditions. We also consider methodological issues that would improve syntheses of results across long-term insect datasets and highlight directions for future empirical work.

scholarly journals Elevational dependence of climate change impacts on water resources in an Alpine catchment

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 3743-3794 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Fatichi ◽  
S. Rimkus ◽  
P. Burlando ◽  
R. Bordoy ◽  
P. Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Resources ◽  
Anthropogenic Impacts ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Daily Maximum ◽  
Significant Implication ◽  
Ice Melt ◽  
Climate Change Effects ◽  
River Diversions

Abstract. An increasing interest is directed toward understanding impacts of climate change on water related sectors in a particularly vulnerable area such as the Alpine region. We present a distributed hydrological analysis at scale significant for water management for pristine, present-days, and projected future climate conditions. We used the upper Rhone basin (Switzerland) as a test case for understanding anthropogenic impacts on water resources and flood risk in the Alpine area. The upper Rhone basin includes reservoirs, river diversions and irrigated areas offering the opportunity to study the interaction between climate change effects and hydraulic infrastructures. We downscale climate model realizations using a methodology that partially account for the uncertainty in climate change projections explicitly simulating stochastic variability of precipitation and air temperature. We show how climate change effects on streamflow propagate from high elevation headwater catchments to the river in the major valley. Changes in the natural hydrological regime imposed by the existing hydraulic infrastructure are likely larger than climate change signals expected by the middle of the 21th century in most of the river network. Despite a strong uncertainty induced by stochastic climate variability, we identified an elevational dependence of climate change impacts on streamflow with a severe reduction due to the missing contribution of water from ice melt at high-elevation and a dampened effect downstream. The presence of reservoirs and river diversions tends to decrease the uncertainty in future streamflow predictions that are conversely very large for highly glacierized catchments. Despite uncertainty, reduced ice cover and ice melt are likely to have significant implication for aquatic biodiversity and hydropower production. The impacts can emerge without any additional climate warming. A decrease of August-September discharge and an increase of hourly-daily maximum flows appear as the most robust projected changes for the different parts of the catchment. However, it is unlikely that major changes in total runoff for the entire upper Rhone basin will occur in the next decades.

Climate change impacts on high elevation saguaro range expansion

2015 ◽  
Vol 116 ◽  
pp. 57-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam C. Springer ◽  
Don E. Swann ◽  
Michael A. Crimmins
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Range Expansion ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
High Elevation

scholarly journals Interpreting common garden studies to understand cueing mechanisms of spring leafing phenology in temperate and boreal tree species

Silva Fennica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Salk
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Tree Species ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Common Garden ◽  
Weather Conditions ◽  
High Elevation ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Climate Change Responses ◽  
Critical Photoperiod ◽  
Leafing Phenology

Trees are particularly susceptible to climate change due to their long lives and slow dispersal. However, trees can adjust the timing of their growing season in response to weather conditions without evolutionary change or long-distance migration. This makes understanding phenological cueing mechanisms a critical task to forecast climate change impacts on forests. Because of slow data accumulation, unconventional and repurposed information is valuable in the study of phenology. Here, I develop and use a framework to interpret what phenological patterns among provenances of a species in a common garden reveal about their leafing cues, and potential climate change responses. Species whose high elevation/latitude provenances leaf first likely have little chilling requirement, or for latitude gradients only, a critical photoperiod cue met relatively early in the season. Species with low latitude/elevation origins leafing first have stronger controls against premature leafing; I argue that these species are likely less phenologically flexible in responding to climate change. Among published studies, the low to high order is predominant among frost-sensitive ring-porous species. Narrow-xylemed species show nearly all possible patterns, sometimes with strong contrasts even within genera for both conifers and angiosperms. Some also show complex patterns, indicating multiple mechanisms at work, and a few are largely undifferentiated across broad latitude gradients, suggesting phenotypic plasticity to a warmer climate. These results provide valuable evidence on which temperate and boreal tree species are most likely to adjust in place to climate change, and provide a framework for interpreting historic or newly-planted common garden studies of phenology.

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