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Background: Although the message of ‘‘global climate change’’ is catalyzing international action, it is local and regional changes that directly affect people and ecosystems and are of immediate concern to scientists, managers, and policy makers. A major barrier preventing informed climate-change adaptation planning is the difficulty accessing, analyzing, and interpreting climate-change information. To address this problem, we developed a powerful, yet easy to use, web-based tool called Climate Wizard (http://ClimateWizard.org) that provides non-climate specialists with simple analyses and innovative graphical depictions for conveying how climate has and is projected to change within specific geographic areas throughout the world. Methodology/Principal Findings: To demonstrate the Climate Wizard, we explored historic trends and future departures (anomalies) in temperature and precipitation globally, and within specific latitudinal zones and countries. We found the greatest temperature increases during 1951–2002 occurred in northern hemisphere countries (especially during January– April), but the latitude of greatest temperature change varied throughout the year, sinusoidally ranging from approximately 50°N during February-March to 10°N during August-September. Precipitation decreases occurred most commonly in countries between 0–20°N, and increases mostly occurred outside of this latitudinal region. Similarly, a quantile ensemble analysis based on projections from 16 General Circulation Models (GCMs) for 2070–2099 identified the median projected change within countries, which showed both latitudinal and regional patterns in projected temperature and precipitation change. Conclusions/Significance: The results of these analyses are consistent with those reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but at the same time, they provide examples of how Climate Wizard can be used to explore regionally and temporally-specific analyses of climate change. Moreover, Climate Wizard is not a static product, but rather a data analysis framework designed to be used for climate change impact and adaption planning, which can be expanded to include other information, such as downscaled future projections of hydrology, soil moisture, wildfire, vegetation, marine conditions, disease, and agricultural productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Woody lianas are critical to tropical forest dynamics because of their strong influence on forest regeneration, disturbance ecology, and biodiversity. Recent studies synthesizing plot data from the tropics indicate that lianas are increasing in both abundance and importance in tropical forests. Moreover, lianas exhibit competitive advantages over trees in elevated CO2 environments and under strong seasonal droughts, suggesting that lianas may be poised to increase not only in abundance but also in spatial distribution in response to changing climate. We used a combination of high-resolution color-infrared videography and hyperspectral imagery from EO-1 Hyperion to map low-lying lianas in Noel Kempff Mercado National Park (NKMNP) in the Bolivian Amazon. Evergreen liana forests comprise as much as 14% of the NKMNP landscape, and low-stature liana patches occupy 1.5% of these forests. We used change vector analysis (CVA) of dry season Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery from 1986 and 2000 to determine changes in liana-dominated patches over time and to assess whether those patches were regenerating to canopy forest. The spatial distribution of liana patches showed that patches were spatially aggregated and were preferentially located in proximity to waterways. The CVA results showed that most of the dense liana patches increased in brightness and greenness and decreased in wetness over the 14 years of the change analysis, while non-liana forest patches changed less and in more random directions. Persistent liana patches increased in area by an average of 59% over the time period. In comparison, large burned areas appeared to recover completely to canopy forest in the same time period. This suggests that the dense liana patches of NKMNP represent an alternative successional pathway characterized not by tree regeneration but rather by a stalled state of low-canopy liana dominance. This research supports hypotheses that liana forests can be a persistent rather than transitional component of tropical forests, and may remain so due to competitive advantages that lianas enjoy under changing climatic conditions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Better stewardship of land is needed to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement goal of holding warming to below 2 °C; however, confusion persists about the specific set of land stewardship options available and their mitigation potential. To address this, we identify and quantify "natural climate solutions" (NCS): 20 conservation, restoration, and improved land management actions that increase carbon storage and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions across global forests, wetlands, grasslands and agricultural lands. We find that the maximum potential of NCS--when constrained by food security, fiber security and biodiversity conservation--is 23.8 petagrams of CO2 equivalent (PgCO2e) y-1 (95%CI 20.3-37.4). This is ⩾30%higher than prior estimates, which did not include the full range of options and safeguards considered here. About half of this maximum (11.3 PgCO2e y-1) represents cost-effective climate mitigation, assuming the social cost of CO2 pollution is ⩾100 USD MgCO2e-1 by 2030. Natural climate solutions can provide 37% of cost-effective CO2 mitigation needed through 2030 for a >66% chance of holding warming to below 2 °C. One-third of this cost-effective NCSmitigation can be delivered at or below 10 USD MgCO2 -1. Most NCS actions--if effectively implemented--also offer water filtration, flood buffering, soil health, biodiversity habitat and enhanced climate resilience. Work remains to better constrain uncertainty of NCS mitigation estimates. Nevertheless, existing knowledge reported here provides a robust basis for immediate global action to improve ecosystem stewardship as a major solution to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim Human activities are largely responsible for the processes that threaten biodiversity, yet potential changes in human behaviour as a response to climate change are ignored in most species and site-based vulnerability assessments (VAs). Here we assess how incorporation of the potential impact of climate change on humans alters our view of vulnerability when using well-established site and species VA methodologies. Location Southern Africa. Methods Our baseline was two published studies that used accepted VA methodologies aimed at examining the direct impacts of climate changes on species and sites. The first identified potential shifts in the distributions of 164 restricted-range avian species, the second forecasted species turnover in 331 Important Bird and Biodiversity Areas (IBAs). We used a published spatially explicit assessment of potential climate change impacts on people to evaluate which species and sites overlap with human populations most likely to be impacted. By doing this, we were able to assess how the integration of potential climate impacts on human populations changes our perception of which species and sites are most vulnerable to climate change. Results We found no correlation between species and sites most likely to be impacted directly by climate change and those where the potential response of human populations could drive major indirect impacts. The relative vulnerability of individual species and sites shifted when potential impacts of climate change on human communities were considered, with more than one-fifth of species and one-tenth of sites moving from 'low' to 'high' risk. Main conclusions Standard VA methodologies that fail to consider how people are likely to respond to climate change will result in systematically biased assessments. This may lead to the implementation of inappropriate management actions, and a failure to address those species or sites that may be uniquely, or additionally, imperilled by the impacts of human responses to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All global circulation models based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios project profound changes, but there is no consensus on how to map their environmental consequences. Our multivariate representation of environmental space combines stable topographic and edaphic attributes with dynamic climatic attributes. We divide that environmental space into 500 unique domains and map their current locations and their projected locations in 2100 under contrasting emissions scenarios. The environmental domains found across half the study area today disappear under the higher emissions scenario, but persist somewhere in it under the lower emissions scenario. Locations affected least and those affected most under each scenario are mapped. This provides an explicit framework for designing conservation networks to include both areas at least risk (potential refugia) and areas at greatest risk, where novel communities may form and where sentinel ecosystems can be monitored for signs of stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]