scholarly journals Extended Dependence of the Hydrological Regime on the Land Cover Change in the Three-North Region of China: An Evaluation under Future Climate Conditions

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi Yao ◽  
Xianhong Xie ◽  
Shanshan Meng ◽  
Bowen Zhu ◽  
Kang Zhang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Ecological Restoration ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Hydrological Regime ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Climate Conditions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Hydrological Effects

The hydrological regime in arid and semi-arid regions is quite sensitive to climate and land cover changes (LCC). The Three-North region (TNR) in China experiences diverse climate conditions, from arid to humid zones. In this region, substantial LCC has occurred over the past decades due to ecological restoration programs and urban expansion. At a regional scale, the hydrological effects of LCC have been demonstrated to be less observable than the effects of climate change, but it is unclear whether or not the effects of LCC may be intensified by future climate conditions. In this study, we employed remote sensing datasets and a macro-scale hydrological modeling to identify the dependence of the future hydrological regime of the TNR on past LCC. The hydrological effects over the period from 2020–2099 were evaluated based on a Representative Concentration Pathway climate scenario. The results indicated that the forest area increased in the northwest (11,691 km2) and the north (69 km2) of China but declined in the northeast (30,042 km2) over the past three decades. Moreover, the urban area has expanded by 1.3% in the TNR. Under the future climate condition, the hydrological regime will be influenced significantly by LCC. Those changes from 1986 to 2015 may alter the future hydrological cycle mainly by promoting runoff (3.24 mm/year) and decreasing evapotranspiration (3.23 mm/year) over the whole region. The spatial distribution of the effects may be extremely uneven: the effects in humid areas would be stronger than those in other areas. Besides, with rising temperatures and precipitation from 2020 to 2099, the LCC may heighten the risk of dryland expansion and flooding more than climate change alone. Despite uncertainties in the datasets and methods, the regional-scale hydrological model provides new insights into the extended impacts of ecological restoration and urbanization on the hydrological regime of the TNR.

Assessment of future climate change impacts on the hydrological regime of selected Greek areas with different climate conditions

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1327-1342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spyridon Paparrizos ◽  
Andreas Matzarakis
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Hydrological Cycle ◽  
Meteorological Data ◽  
Hydrological Regime ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Future Climate Change ◽  
Water Losses ◽  
Climate Conditions ◽  
The Future

Assessment of future variations of streamflow is essential for research regarding climate and climate change. This study is focused on three agricultural areas widespread in Greece and aims to assess the future response of annual and seasonal streamflow and its impacts on the hydrological regime, in combination with other fundamental aspects of the hydrological cycle in areas with different climate classification. ArcSWAT ArcGIS extension was used to simulate the future responses of streamflow. Future meteorological data were obtained from various regional climate models, and analysed for the periods 2021–2050 and 2071–2100. In all the examined areas, streamflow is expected to be reduced. Areas characterized by continental climate will face minor reductions by the mid-century that will become very intense by the end and thus these areas will become more resistant to future changes. Autumn season will face the strongest reductions. Areas characterized by Mediterranean conditions will be very vulnerable in terms of future climate change and winter runoff will face the most significant decreases. Reduced precipitation is the main reason for decreased streamflow. High values of actual evapotranspiration by the end of the century will act as an inhibitor towards reduced runoff and partly counterbalance the water losses.

Trading space for time: Assessment of tree habitat shifts under climate change using bioclimatic envelopes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Enigl ◽  
Matthias Schlögl ◽  
Christoph Matulla
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Tree Species ◽  
Ips Typographus ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Forest Damage ◽  
Climate Conditions ◽  
North East ◽  
Bioclimatic Variables ◽  
The Future ◽  
Forest District

<p>Climate change constitutes a main driver of altering population dynamics of spruce bark beetles (<em>Ips typographus</em>) all over Europe. Their swarming activity as well as development rate are strongly dependent on temperature and the availability of brood trees. Especially over the last years, the latter has substantially increased due to major drought events which led to a widespread weakening of spruce stands. Since both higher temperatures and longer drought periods are to be expected in Central Europe in the decades ahead, foresters face the challenges of maintaining sustainable forest management and safeguarding future yields. One approach used to foster decision support in silviculture relies on the identification of possible alternative tree species suitable for adapting to expected future climate conditions in threatened regions. </p><p>In this study, we focus on the forest district of Horn, a region in Austria‘s north east that is beneficially influenced by the mesoclimate of the Pannonian basin. This fertile yet dry area has been severely affected by mass propagations of <em>Ips typographus</em> due to extensive droughts since 2017, and consequently has suffered from substantial forest damage in recent years. The urgent need for action was realized and has expedited the search for more robust alternative species to ensure sustainable silviculture in the area.</p><p>The determination of suitable tree species is based on the identification of regions whose climatic conditions in the recent past are similar to those that are to be expected in the forest district of Horn in the future. To characterize these conditions, we consider 19 bioclimatic variables that are derived from monthly temperature and rainfall values. Using downscaled CMIP6 projections with a spatial resolution of 2.5 minutes, we determine future conditions in Horn throughout the 21st century. By employing 20-year periods from 2021 to 2100 for the scenarios SSP1-26, SSP2-45, SSP3-70 and SSP5-85,  and comparing them to worldwide past climate conditions, we obtain corresponding bioclimatic regions for four future time slices until the end of the century. The Euclidian distance is applied as measure of similarity, effectively yielding similarity maps on a continuous scale. In order to account for the spatial variability within the forest district, this procedure is performed for the colder northwest and the warmer southeast of the area, individually seeking similar bioclimatic regions for each of these two subregions. Results point to Eastern Europe as well as the Po Valley in northern Italy as areas exhibiting the highest similarity to the future climate in this North-Eastern part of Austria.</p>

scholarly journals Warm climates of the past—a lesson for the future?

2013 ◽  
Vol 371 (2001) ◽  
pp. 20130146 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Lunt ◽  
H. Elderfield ◽  
R. Pancost ◽  
A. Ridgwell ◽  
G. L. Foster ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Numerical Models ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Future Climate Change ◽  
Climate Data ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Past Climate ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Warm Climates

This Discussion Meeting Issue of the Philosophical Transactions A had its genesis in a Discussion Meeting of the Royal Society which took place on 10–11 October 2011. The Discussion Meeting, entitled ‘Warm climates of the past: a lesson for the future?’, brought together 16 eminent international speakers from the field of palaeoclimate, and was attended by over 280 scientists and members of the public. Many of the speakers have contributed to the papers compiled in this Discussion Meeting Issue. The papers summarize the talks at the meeting, and present further or related work. This Discussion Meeting Issue asks to what extent information gleaned from the study of past climates can aid our understanding of future climate change. Climate change is currently an issue at the forefront of environmental science, and also has important sociological and political implications. Most future predictions are carried out by complex numerical models; however, these models cannot be rigorously tested for scenarios outside of the modern, without making use of past climate data. Furthermore, past climate data can inform our understanding of how the Earth system operates, and can provide important contextual information related to environmental change. All past time periods can be useful in this context; here, we focus on past climates that were warmer than the modern climate, as these are likely to be the most similar to the future. This introductory paper is not meant as a comprehensive overview of all work in this field. Instead, it gives an introduction to the important issues therein, using the papers in this Discussion Meeting Issue, and other works from all the Discussion Meeting speakers, as exemplars of the various ways in which past climates can inform projections of future climate. Furthermore, we present new work that uses a palaeo constraint to quantitatively inform projections of future equilibrium ice sheet change.

scholarly journals Disturbance legacies have a stronger effect on future carbon exchange than climate in a temperate forest landscape

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominik Thom ◽  
Werner Rammer ◽  
Rita Garstenauer ◽  
Rupert Seidl
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Temperate Forest ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Natural Disturbance ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Forest Landscape ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Forest C

Abstract. Forest ecosystems play an important role in the global climate system, and are thus intensively discussed in the context of climate change mitigation. Over the past decades temperate forests were a carbon (C) sink to the atmosphere. However, it remains unclear to which degree this C uptake is driven by a recovery from past disturbances vs. ongoing climate warming, inducing high uncertainty regarding the future temperate forest C sink. Here our objectives were (i) to investigate legacies within the natural disturbance regime by empirically analyzing two disturbance episodes affecting the same landscape 90 years apart, and (ii) to unravel the effects of past disturbances and future climate on 21st century forest C uptake by means of simulation modelling. We collected historical data from archives to reconstruct vegetation and disturbance history of a forest landscape in the Austrian Alps from 1905 to 2013. The effect of past legacies and future climate was determined by simulating 32 different combinations of past disturbances (including natural disturbances and management) and future climate scenarios. We found only moderate spatial overlap between two episodes of wind and bark beetle disturbance affecting the landscape in the early 20th and 21st century, respectively. The future forest C sink was driven by past disturbances, while climate change reduced forest C uptake. Historic management (and its cessation) had a considerably stronger influence on the future C balance than the natural disturbance episodes of the past. We conclude that neglecting disturbance legacies can substantially bias assessments of future forest dynamics.

scholarly journals Potential impact of climate change on the geographical distribution of two wild vectors of Chagas disease in Chile: Mepraia spinolai and Mepraia gajardoi

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén Garrido ◽  
Antonella Bacigalupo ◽  
Francisco Peña-Gómez ◽  
Ramiro O. Bustamante ◽  
Pedro E. Cattan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
Chagas Disease ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Climate Conditions ◽  
Pacific Side ◽  
Control And Prevention ◽  
Risk Situation

Abstract Background Mepraia gajardoi and Mepraia spinolai are endemic triatomine vector species of Trypanosoma cruzi, a parasite that causes Chagas disease. These vectors inhabit arid, semiarid and Mediterranean areas of Chile. Mepraia gajardoi occurs from 18° to 25°S, and M. spinolai from 26° to 34°S. Even though both species are involved in T. cruzi transmission in the Pacific side of the Southern Cone of South America, no study has modelled their distributions at a regional scale. Therefore, the aim of this study is to estimate the potential geographical distribution of M. spinolai and M. gajardoi under current and future climate scenarios. Methods We used the Maxent algorithm to model the ecological niche of M. spinolai and M. gajardoi, estimating their potential distributions from current climate information and projecting their distributions to future climatic conditions under representative concentration pathways (RCP) 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5 scenarios. Future predictions of suitability were constructed considering both higher and lower public health risk situations. Results The current potential distributions of both species were broader than their known ranges. For both species, climate change projections for 2070 in RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 and 8.5 scenarios showed different results depending on the methodology used. The higher risk situation showed new suitable areas, but the lower risk situation modelled a net reduction in the future potential distribution areas of M. spinolai and M. gajardoi. Conclusions The suitable areas for both species may be greater than currently known, generating new challenges in terms of vector control and prevention. Under future climate conditions, these species could modify their potential geographical range. Preventive measures to avoid accidental human vectorial transmission by wild vectors of T. cruzi become critical considering the uncertainty of future suitable areas projected in this study.

scholarly journals Determining the response of African biota to climate change: using the past to model the future

2013 ◽  
Vol 368 (1625) ◽  
pp. 20120491 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. J. Willis ◽  
K. D. Bennett ◽  
S. L. Burrough ◽  
M. Macias-Fauria ◽  
C. Tovar
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Regional Scale ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Future Climate Change ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
The Past ◽  
Community Turnover ◽  
Climate Change Information ◽  
Vegetation Models ◽  
Huge Variation

Prediction of biotic responses to future climate change in tropical Africa tends to be based on two modelling approaches: bioclimatic species envelope models and dynamic vegetation models. Another complementary but underused approach is to examine biotic responses to similar climatic changes in the past as evidenced in fossil and historical records. This paper reviews these records and highlights the information that they provide in terms of understanding the local- and regional-scale responses of African vegetation to future climate change. A key point that emerges is that a move to warmer and wetter conditions in the past resulted in a large increase in biomass and a range distribution of woody plants up to 400–500 km north of its present location, the so-called greening of the Sahara. By contrast, a transition to warmer and drier conditions resulted in a reduction in woody vegetation in many regions and an increase in grass/savanna-dominated landscapes. The rapid rate of climate warming coming into the current interglacial resulted in a dramatic increase in community turnover, but there is little evidence for widespread extinctions. However, huge variation in biotic response in both space and time is apparent with, in some cases, totally different responses to the same climatic driver. This highlights the importance of local features such as soils, topography and also internal biotic factors in determining responses and resilience of the African biota to climate change, information that is difficult to obtain from modelling but is abundant in palaeoecological records.

scholarly journals Quantitative analysis of the impacts of climate and land-cover changes on urban flood runoffs: a case of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Mzava ◽  
Patrick Valimba ◽  
Joel Nobert
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Land Cover Change ◽  
Dar Es Salaam ◽  
Land Cover Changes ◽  
Urban Flooding ◽  
Combined Effects ◽  
Peak Flows ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future

Abstract Over the past half-century, the risk of urban flooding in Dar es Salaam has increased due to changes in land cover coupled with climatic changes. This paper aimed to quantify the impacts of climate and land-cover changes on the magnitudes and frequencies of flood runoffs in urban Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A calibrated and validated SWAT rainfall-runoff model was used to generate flood hydrographs for the period 1969–2050 using historical rainfall data and projected rainfall based on the CORDEX-Africa regional climate model. Results showed that climate change has a greater impact on change in peak flows than land-cover change when the two are treated separately in theory. It was observed that, in the past, the probability of occurrence of urban flooding in the study area was likely to be increased up to 1.5-fold by climate change relative to land-cover change. In the future, this figure is estimated to decrease to 1.1-fold. The coupled effects of climate and land-cover changes cause a much bigger impact on change in peak flows than any separate scenario; this scenario represents the actual scenario on the ground. From the combined effects of climate and land-cover changes, the magnitudes of mean peak flows were determined to increase between 34.4 and 58.6% in the future relative to the past. However, the change in peak flows from combined effects of climate and land-cover changes will decrease by 36.3% in the future relative to the past; owing to the lesser variations in climate and land-cover changes in the future compared with those of the past.

scholarly journals Effects of Slope Ecological Restoration on Runoff and Its Response to Climate Change

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (20) ◽  
pp. 4017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shan He ◽  
Tianling Qin ◽  
Fang Liu ◽  
Shanshan Liu ◽  
Biqiong Dong ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Ecological Restoration ◽  
Dry Season ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Climate Scenarios ◽  
Forest Land ◽  
Wet Season ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Influence

Slope ecological restoration and climate change are important factors affecting the hydrological processes of the Huangshui River Basin in Qinghai province, China. How to quantitatively identify the impact of slope ecological restoration on runoff and whether slope ecological restoration can mitigate the impact of future climate change on runoff are both very important. In this paper, the Huangshui River above the center of Minhe county was taken as the research area, and the Pinus tabulaeformis and shrubs were taken as the main forest land types of slope ecological restoration. First, based on the law of forest land variation, the construction scales of slope ecological restoration in different periods were identified. The influence of slope ecological restoration on runoff was then quantitatively evaluated by using a distributed hydrological model. Second, the future climate scenarios of five general circulation models (GCMs) under three representative concentration pathways (RCPs) (i.e., RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5) from 2021 to 2050 were selected and modified by model integration. Combined with the slope ecological restoration scenarios, the influence of slope ecological restoration on runoff under future climate scenarios was explored. The results showed that the effect of slope ecological restoration was significant. Compared with 1980, the area of slope ecological restoration increased by 24% in 2017. Under the present climate conditions (1960–2017), different periods of slope ecological restoration have an effect on the process of runoff in the wet season (June, July, August, and September) and dry season (January, February, March, and December), which eliminates the maximum, replenishes the minimum, and reduces the variability of runoff processes in the watershed. Under the future climate scenario (2021–50), slope ecological restoration will reduce runoff. On the other hand, climate change will increase runoff, and the combination of the two effects will have a certain offsetting effect. On the whole, comparing the influence of slope ecological restoration on the runoff process with that of climate change in different seasons, due to the main influence of slope ecological restoration, the runoff decreased by about 55% in the temperate season (April, May, October, and November), and increased by about 50% in the dry season or wet season due to the main influence of future climate scenarios.

scholarly journals Potential Impacts of Climate Change on UK Potato Production

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-52
Author(s):  
Olufemi Samson Adesina ◽  
Brian Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Potato Production ◽  
Potato Industry ◽  
Future Climate ◽  
Weather Data ◽  
The Past ◽  
Spatial Coverage ◽  
Recent Climate ◽  
The Future ◽  
Impacts Of Climate Change

This study assessed the potential impacts of climate change on potato production in the United Kingdom. Climate change actions are becoming a nightmare for growers worldwide, and the British potato industry is not an exception. Extreme weather conditions were experienced in 2006, 2012, and 2018, respectively. Thus, this study identified the future climate risk associated with major potato producing regions in the UK using the recent climate projection weather data (UKCP18) based on RCP 8.5. In total, the study considered seven (7) regions with a minimum average of 3000 hectares of potato planted area in the past five years. Findings showed that drought, high temperatures, and prolonged precipitation caused significant yield and quality loss in the past, with a likelihood of causing a more harmful impact in the future. The analysis revealed a hotter (Tmax ≥ 25°C, Tmin ≥ 15°C) and drier (1-1.5 mm day-1) summer most especially in the EE, EM, SW, WM, and YH as well as a warmer (Tmax& Tmin 6-10°C) and wetter winter (5 mm day-1 on average) in Scotland and North West England respectively. Future climate is predicted to hinder land preparation and harvesting operation in the Northern regions while the EE, EM, SW, WM, and YH would be faced with drought, with irrigation and water demand increasing by 20-30% as evapotranspiration also increases by 20-30% in 2050-2080. Irrigated potatoes are predicted to double its current spatial coverage in the future. The study identified suitable adaptation measures and strategies required to reduce the impacts of climate change on the British potato industry.

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