The influence of Climate Change on plant development as well as on carbon and nitrogen cycling in soils is an important research topic for Global Change impact assessment at the regional scale. These changes affect the availability and quality of ground and surface waters and accordingly the future productivity of agriculturally used landscapes. The integrated assessment of these changes requires a robust prediction of the potential future characteristics of soil temperature and moisture based on scale-appropriate, process-oriented models.

Climate change is affecting species distribution, composition of biological communities, and species traits. Despite the growing body of knowledge on the reaction of species to climate change, the potentially delayed response of species is still severely understudied. In this paper we modelled the time needed by ground‐living invertebrates to effectively react to habitat modification induced by climate change in relation to dispersal abilities.

Land cover conversion intensively occurred in the Tibetan Plateau of China during the past decades. However, responses of soil properties and soil microbial activities to land cover conversion under different land cover types have not been fully understood. The objective was to assess the effects of land cover conversion on soil C and N stocks and soil microbial properties of topsoil of an alpine meadow in the Tibetan Plateau. Soil cores of surface soil (0–20 cm) were collected from three adjacent land cover types: native alpine meadow, artificial grassland and mound-shaped denuded land.

Testate amoebae that inhabit peat are sensitive indicators of water table position. In this study, we used testate amoebae in sediments from a mire in the western Alps (Lac du Thyl) to: (1) reconstruct the hydrology of the site over the last 7,000 years, (2) determine how hydrological changes affected testate amoebae diversity and (3) infer past trophic state shifts. The study site is located in one of the driest valleys of the Alps and is thus very sensitive to hydrological changes.

As in many other developing countries, cities in Bangladesh have witnessed rapid urbanization, resulting in increasing amounts of land being taken over and therefore land cover changing at a faster rate. Until now, however, few efforts have been made to document the impact of land use and land cover changes on the climate, environment, and ecosystem of the country because of a lack of geospatial data and time-series information.

Az egyre növekvő energiafelhasználás, világnépesség és éhezés olyan, több évtizede megoldatlan problémák, amelyeket a klímaváltozás és az ez által kialakult szélsőséges időjárási viszonyok tovább súlyosbítottak, a napjainkban tapasztalható gazdasági válság pedig még inkább megnehezítheti megoldásukat.A megújítható energiaforrások szerepének növelésében katalizátorszerepet betöltő Európai Unió már a 80-as évek elején megoldást keresett a túltermelés következtében felhalmozódott szántóföldi termékek felhasználására.

The abandonment of traditional rural life in mountain areas has favoured the expansion of forest in the headwaters of Pyrenean rivers. In this paper, we (i) analyse hydro‐climatic trends at the annual and monthly scales in three nested sub‐catchments in a central Pyrenean basin and (ii) quantify the relative contribution of climate change and forest cover on the observed changes in runoff. Land use maps indicate an increase in the forest cover in all sub‐basins for the period 1987–2009.

During recent decades, forests have expanded into new areas throughout the whole of Norway. The processes explained as causing the forest expansion have focused mainly on climate or land use changes. To enable a spatially explicit separation of the effects following these two main drivers behind forest expansion, the authors set out to model the potential for natural forest regeneration following land use abandonment, given the present climatic conditions.

Human-induced global climate change presents a unique and difficult challenge to the conservation of biodiversity. Despite increasing attention on global climate change, few studies have assessed the projected impacts of sea-level rise to threatened and endangered species. Therefore, we estimated the impacts of rising sea levels on the endangered Lower Keys marsh rabbit (Sylvilagus palustris hefneri) across its geographic distribution under scenarios of current conditions, low (0.3-m), medium (0.6-m), and high (0.9-m) sea-level rise.

Habitat loss and climate change pose a double jeopardy for many threatened taxa, making the identification of optimal habitat for the future a conservation priority. Using a case study of the endangered Bornean orang‐utan, we identify environmental refuges by integrating bioclimatic models with projected deforestation and oil‐palm agriculture suitability from the 1950s to 2080s. We coupled a maximum entropy algorithm with information on habitat needs to predict suitable habitat for the present day and 1950s.

Arid regions in Asia are commonly characterized by rapidly growing populations with limited land resources and varying rainfall frequencies under climatic change. Despite being one of the most important environmental challenges in Asia, the changing aridity in this region, particularly due to large-scale land cover change, has not been well documented. In this study, we used rainfall data and a new land heterogeneity index to identify recent trend in land cover changes in the Asian arid regions.

For many of the world’s lakes, particularly those in remote regions, an assessment of the basin’s sensitivity to climate change is limited by the availability of appropriate hydrologic data. A regional steady-state lake water balance model was developed that uses simple, yet easily estimated or obtained, data to generate an aridity index (potential evapotranspiration to precipitation ratio) to predict changes in lake basin area to lake surface area ratio, a non-dimensional lake-basin property that can be easily obtained from digital maps.