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In 1936, Erich Fischer-Brugge, who worked as a surgeon at the University Clinic of Munster, Westfalia, Germany, visited Wilhelm Tonnis in Wurzburg, to receive neurosurgical training. He commenced his work in the field of neurosurgery in Munster from 1937. In 1938 he published a new classification of the anterior circulation of cerebral arteries in states of tumorous mass lesions. From 1939 through to the end of WW II, Tonnis and Fischer-Brugge worked closely together, mainly in the field of war surgery. After WW II, in 1949, Fischer-Brugge published another relevant clinical contribution on the "Clivuskantensyndom". He recognised the ipsilateral osseous compression of the oculomotor nerve at the sphenoidal ridge in raised intracranial pressure. Paul Sunder-Plassmann, successor of Hermann Coenen as chief of surgery at the University Clinic in 1946, inhibited Fischer-Brugge's neurosurgical work massively. After numerous unsuccessful applications for newly installed neurosurgical units, Fischer-Brugge died at the age of only 46 years.

A Bacia do Alto Paraguai (BAP) inclui a planície inundável do Pantanal e as áreas altas no entorno que drenam para o rio Paraguai, uma região de transição entre quatro grandes domínios fitofisionômicos da América do Sul – Cerrado, Chaco, Amazônia e Mata Atlântica. A fauna da região é pobre em endemismos, porém as posições central e transicional no continente conferem enorme riqueza de animais vertebrados, oriundos de diferentes domínios, especialmente quanto à ordem Chiroptera. Aqui, revisamos as espécies de morcegos registradas na BAP e apresentamos mapas de distribuição e breve descrição de cada espécie, incluindo dados de tamanho, forma, cor, ambientes, abrigos, hábito alimentar e interações com predadores e parasitas. Encontramos registro de 93 espécies em sete famílias – Emballonuridae (3), Noctilionidae (2), Mormoopidae (2), Phyllostomidae (51), Natalidae (1), Molossidae (20) e Vespertilionidae (14). Foram registradas 66 espécies na planície e 84 no entorno; com 59 espécies reportadas na planície e no entorno. Quase dois terços das espécies (63%) foram registrados em cinco ou mais localidades na BAP, e um quinto (19%) em apenas uma localidade. A fauna de morcegos da BAP destaca a grande importância dessa região para a manutenção da diversidade de morcegos na América do Sul.

Roundtable on Compound Hazards and COVID-19 What: An online panel with leading experts in compound hazard research, preparedness, and response, attended by over 80 online participants, met to discuss hazard response in the context of COVID-19. When: 30 June 2021 Where: Online, convened by the World Meteorological Organization and hosted by the American Geophysical Union Peer Reviewed "Article signat per 12 autors/es: Benjamin F. Zaitchik, Judy Omumbo, Rachel Lowe, Maarten van Aalst, Liana O. Anderson, Erich Fischer, Charlotte Norman, Joanne Robbins, Rosa Barciela, Juli Trtanj, Rosa von Borries, and Jürg Luterbacher"

In climate change attribution, unprecedented magnitudes of extreme events can be defined on the basis of thresholds in the pre-industrial distributions of event magnitudes. This notion of unprecedented levels of climate change impacts has been extended toward the lifetime exposure to extreme events by evaluating exposure frequency. Unprecedented exposure to extreme events is assessed by comparing average lifetime exposure under different climate scenarios to an upper percentile of exposure in a pre-industrial climate. Here we combine simulations of climate change impacts under different climate forcing scenarios with country-level demography datasets to estimate the fraction of the global population experiencing unprecedented exposure to extreme events. This is done for 29 global mean temperature trajectories taken from the AR6 scenario explorer and multiple extreme event categories such as heatwaves, floods and droughts. Further, we assess the age of emergence at which birth cohorts reach unprecedented levels of exposure.

Recent unprecedented extremes such as the 2023 New Year’s winter warm spell in Europe, the 2022 summer heat and dryness in China and Europe, the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave, the 2021 floods in northwestern Germany and the 2020 Siberian heat anomaly broke previous observed record intensities by large margins. Based on the observations up to the year before the event, some of these record-shattering extremes were inconceivable. Could the scientific community have better quantified the potential for such unseen events based on the current generation of climate models?Here, we demonstrate how a new ensemble boosting approach can be used to generate physically coherent storylines of such unseen events. In ensemble boosting a fully-coupled free-running climate model (CESM2) is used to develop physical storylines of very rare extremes. To this end, the most extreme events in an initial-condition large ensemble for the near future are re-initialized with slightly perturbed atmospheric initial conditions to efficiently generate events with magnitudes unprecedented in the observational record.We demonstrate that, with this approach, CESM2 can simulate events that e.g. substantially exceed the magnitude of the 2021 Pacific Northwest (PNW) heatwave anomaly. Even though the most extreme ensemble members were only selected based on the local temperature anomaly over the PNW region, they show a very similar temporal evolution and spatial pattern as the observed event. The associated 500hPa geopotential height anomaly is remarkably similar to the observed event with a strong anticyclone over PNW that is part of a wave pattern extending over much of the Northern Hemisphere. We further show that in some of the storylines pre-conditioning dry soils strongly contributed to the heatwave intensity, whereas in others, heatwaves of similar magnitude occur even at average land surface conditions.We further develop storylines for heatwaves in the Greater Paris and Chicago regions of much greater intensities than ever observed. Particularly the US Midwest, where no intensification of heatwaves has been observed in recent decades, has not experienced anything close to the heatwave intensities possible in the coming years.Finally, we demonstrate examples how ensemble boosting can also be used to generate storylines for multi-year drought events and large-scale heavy precipitation extremes and compare the findings to other storyline approaches. Event storylines based on ensemble boosting can be used in impact studies that require physical consistency across variables, e.g., for the evaluation of humid heatwaves or compound events, for assessing wildfire risks or for ecosystem modelling.

Fuelled by our changing climate, the summer of 2022 was one of the warmest on record, with numerous heatwaves and other weather extremes occurring around the globe. However, there is limited quantitative evidence on the contribution of human-induced warming to the weather-related health impacts observed in recent extreme weather events. We present a health attribution analysis of heat-related mortality attributable to human-induced climate change in the past summer of 2022 in Switzerland. We combined state-of-the-art methods in climate science and epidemiology with high-resolution mortality and temperature data to estimate the number and fraction of all-cause deaths that could be attributed to heat between June and August 2022. We, thus, estimated that 623 [95% CI: 151 - 1,068] all-cause deaths can be attributed to heat between June and August 2022, representing 3.5% [95% CI: 0.9-6.1] of total all-cause mortality during the same period. In a second step, we modelled counterfactual daily temperatures representing summer 2022 in absence of anthropogenic climate change. Specifically, four counterfactual daily mean temperature series were derived by subtracting the anthropogenic signal from the observed series which ranged between 1.19 and 2.75 ºC. Then, we quantified the hypothetical heat mortality burden in absence of climate change, and finally, estimate the contribution of climate change by subtracting it from the observed heat mortality impacts. We estimated that, in absence of an anthropogenic signal, the heat-related burden would have amounted to 1.4% [95% CI: -0.2 - 3.4] of all-cause mortality, corresponding to 253 deaths [95% CI: -27;594]. Thus, 2.1% [95% CI: 0.8 - 3.7] of the all-cause mortality in summer 2022 would have been avoided in absence of anthropogenic warming. This corresponds to 370 [95% CI: 133-644] deaths and 60% of the observed heat-mortality burden between June-August 2022. Females and the oldest age group were the most affected. Specifically, 60% of heat-related deaths attributed to climate change were in females (220 [69 - 393] vs. 150 [62 - 250] in males), and 90% in older adults (330 [129-565] vs. 39 [-5 - 84]). Our findings confirm that climate change is already affecting the health of the population in Switzerland by amplifying the heat-related mortality burden, with a stronger impact on females and older adults.

Global mean surface air temperature (GSAT) is a key diagnostic for understanding and constraining historical climate variability and change, and for climate policy. Yet, global temperature estimates (1) are usually based on blending sea surface temperatures (SST) with near-surface air temperature over land (LSAT), and (2) contain many missing values due to incomplete coverage in the historical record. While these issues are usually accounted for in model-observation comparisons, elucidating the consistency of LSAT and SST records, and their contribution to GSAT variability and change, remains difficult.Here, we present a set of new GSAT reconstructions based separately on either the historical LSAT or SST record. The method is based on regularized linear regression models trained on climate model simulations to optimally predict GSAT from the climate model’s LSAT or SST patterns, respectively. We then predict GSAT from the HadSST4 and CRUTEM5 observational data, respectively, for each month from January 1850 up to December 2020.We demonstrate that the land- or ocean based GSAT estimates show very similar variability and long-term changes, both in the early (1850-1900) as well as in the late record (post-1950). For example, GSAT of the past decade (2011-2020) increased by 1.15°C (LSAT-based) and 1.17°C (SST-based) relative to an early reference period (1850-1900), which is both well within IPCC AR6 estimates.However, the GSAT estimates show pronounced disagreement in the early 20th century (1900 up to around 1930), when the SST-based GSAT estimates appear on average around 0.3°C colder than the LSAT-based estimates. Decadal changes in the LSAT-based estimates are well explained by the multi-model mean of CMIP6 simulations driven with historical forcings, thus implying only a small role of unforced decadal global variability. In contrast, the SST-based estimate highlights pronounced variability during the early 20th century cold anomaly, which may be related to concerns about instrumental cold biases in SST measurements, but overall reasons for the disagreement remain unclear. Further analysis based on physical reasoning, climate models, and proxy reconstructions, indicates that the ocean data may indeed be implausibly cold.In conclusion, our methodology and results may help to constrain the magnitude of early 20th century warming, and thus to better understand and attribute decadal climate variability.

The amplitude of precipitation extremes across Europe is expected to increase through the 21st century under most climate change scenarios. Current coarse-resolution global climate models broadly project increased flooding and drought extremes; however, they often rely on parametrizations schemes or downscaling methods when simulating potential future extreme events. These methods often introduce errors leading to high levels of uncertainty for policy makers and infrastructure planning. The need for accurate extreme event predictions became further evident after the July 2021 floods and summer 2022 record-breaking heatwaves/drought across Western Europe.The ongoing H2020 Next Generation Earth Modelling Systems (NextGEMS) project aims to address these issues with the development of storm-resolving Earth-system models. Using the latest Cycle 2 runs from the Integrated Forecast System (IFS) from ECMWF and ICON from MPI-M at 4 km and 5 km horizontal resolution respectively, we examine the dynamical representation of extreme precipitation events across Europe and compare against similar analogues in the Copernicus European Regional Reanalysis (CERRA) and observational datasets. The 5.5 km horizontal resolution within CERRA allows for an analysis of precipitation characteristics in complex terrain like the Alpes. This approach is applied to examining atmospheric river dynamics such as integrated moisture transport behavior, precipitation distribution, and vertical structure of the low-level jet., The 28th IUGG General Assembly (IUGG2023) (Berlin 2023)

Primer: The record-shattering Pacific Northwest heatwave in late June 2021 challenged a key element of extreme event attribution, namely, the statistical evaluation of the event likelihood given historical records up to the event. The respective model, a non-stationary generalised extreme value (GEV) distribution depending on a global mean temperature covariate, suggested an infinite return period, or zero probability of reaching the event intensity in the year in which it was observed, based on the historical record. The apparent shortcoming of the method triggered a widespread debate about the general suitability of this statistical approach and its ability to provide informative insight in the context of extreme event attribution.Research objective: The aim of this study is to first evaluate the quality of return period estimates for very rare heatwave events to determine whether or not the method can reliably characterise the event likelihood of rare extremes. We then assess the contributions of different factors to systematic deviations in tail estimates (such as high quantiles or return periods) relevant for rare event attribution statements. We consider both aspects associated with the statistical method, as well as such related to the attribution procedure.Data & Methods: A robust evaluation of tail estimates requires vast amounts of homogeneous data. Our analysis is based on two transient historical and future (RCP8.5 and SSP3.7) initial condition large ensembles (84 and 100 members) and an extensive bootstrap dataset of extreme values simulated from parametric GEV distributions.Results: We demonstrate that also in climate model experiments, events analogous to the 2021 heatwave are simulated, which, assessed with data up to the event, would have deemed to have zero occurrence probability. Thus, also within the climate model context, we find that the non-stationary GEV approach yields substantially biased exceedance probability estimates for low-likelihood events, thereby overestimating the respective return period or underestimating the likelihood of occurrence if the GEV distribution is based on a relatively short “historical” record. This systematic has become particularly pronounced in recent extreme events due to the emergence of a distinct climate change signal and high rate of warming.Especially maximum likelihood estimates of the non-stationary GEV distribution are prone to systematically underestimate the shape parameter, and in consequence overestimate the return periods. We demonstrate that the bias arises because the GEV fit is restricted to rather short time series, and it is partially alleviated if a Bayesian estimation approach is used. Furthermore, widely used symmetric, so-called Wald-type maximum likelihood confidence intervals are found to be a rather inadequate and misleading measure of the estimation uncertainty in GEV-parameters and tail quantities like return levels. For these reasons, Wald-type confidence intervals should thus not be used for model evaluation purposes in extreme event attribution studies.

Extreme precipitation events cause major ecological and societal hazards (e.g. river flooding and landslides). Aggravatingly, climate change will likely exacerbate extreme precipitation events on a global scale. Scientifically even more concerning, however, are remaining major uncertainties in projections of regional extreme precipitation events, which hamper and complicate local adaptation measurements around the globe. The arguably largest source of these remaining uncertainties stems from climate models feuding about the dynamic evolution of atmospheric circulation; atmospheric circulation governs moisture transport and profoundly affects the location of extreme precipitation events as well as their severity around the globe. We exploit this feud among climate models to narrow down the arguably largest source of uncertainttiesin projections of extreme precipitation events through a storyline approach. For a given location, the approach: (i) unravels the properties of driving weather systems that repeatedly gave rise to extreme precipitation events in the past, (ii) assesses the fidelity of a large suite of models, participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6), in representing these driving weather systems in historical simulations (1950-2015), and (iii) constrains regional projections of extreme precipitation events based on the ascertained fidelity of models.Here, we present such a storyline approach that dynamically constrains regional projections of extreme precipitation events. Accompanying the outline of the approach, we identify regions that are particularly plagued by uncertain projections of extreme precipitation events and showcase for a subset of these regions how to track down weather systems that repeatedly gave rise to extreme precipitation events in the past.

Despite the high confidence in the overall intensification of extreme precipitation at global scale in response to warming, uncertainties in regional intensity and spatial distribution remain large. Changes due to thermodynamical processes are largely consistent across global climate models and account for the globally homogeneous increase in extreme precipitation, whereas changes in dynamical processes modify the regional responses of extreme precipitation and are also mainly responsible for the projected uncertainties. We here aim at developing and characterizing different storylines for regional changes in extreme precipitation.The latest CMIP6 multi-model ensembles allow for disentangling the three potential sources of uncertainty across climate models. Specifically, we find that scenario uncertainty in annual maximum precipitation (Rx1day) per K global warming is relatively small except over tropical Pacific and subtropical Africa regions. In order to isolate the inter-model uncertainty, which primarily relates to different responses in atmospheric dynamics, we here average multiple members from initial condition ensembles within CMIP6. To further characterize the dynamical processes and their effects on extreme precipitation, clusters of different model responses to climate change are identified for Mediterranean and Asian monsoon regions. The clusters are defined based on metrics that characterize regional dynamics. Different atmospheric fields are evaluated to develop physical storylines of future changes in extreme precipitation with model clusters representing similar dynamical responses. Specifically, an overall anticyclonic change is found to be characteristic for projections indicating highest reduction in Rx1day over Mediterranean. Future extreme precipitation changes over South Asia are linked to the models' representation of western coastal precipitation and orographic rainfall over the Himalaya. Other potential factors characterizing dynamical responses will be further examined to help understand changes in regional projections of extreme precipitation.

Because long-term observations are sparse and heavily affected by inter-annual variability, the detection of forced trends in land carbon uptake has been remarkably difficult. While changes in aggregated monthly or yearly carbon uptake have been heavily studied, changes in the diurnal cycle of carbon uptake remain uninvestigated. Here, we evaluate long-term changes in three-hourly Net Ecosystem Production (NEP) and the contribution of different times of the day to long-term changes in the terrestrial carbon sink. We first show that between 1950 and 2014, five CMIP6 models show a significant increasing trend in the diurnal NEP amplitude (DNA). Second, we show that DNA trends have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio compared to trends in NEP itself, and linearly scale with long-term annual NEP. Evaluating these model-based results against observations, we show that positive DNA trends are also found at a majority of observational eddy-covariance sites between 1990 and 2022. The positive correlation between DNA and long-term NEP is also confirmed by these observations. Our results reveal a widespread but previously undocumented emergent climate signal in terrestrial carbon exchange at the diurnal scale with the potential to serve as a new observational constraint for Earth system models.

Heat extremes show the fastest warming trend over western Europe (WEU) and a weak cooling trend over the Midwest United States (MUS). We use observations and Earth System Model (ESM) large ensemble simulations to understand why the observed trends over these two regions are opposite. Based on the dynamical adjustment method we provide observational and model evidence that circulation changes greatly amplify the warming trends over WEU and weaken the trends over MUS in the last four decades. We find that circulation-driven changes in heat extremes cause ~0.2°C/decade cooling over MUS that reverses the weaker warming effects of all other forcings combined and thus leads to very small overall trends. In contrast, it causes an additional ~0.2°C/decade warming over WEU, which accounts for ~35% of the warming rate that is caused by forced thermodynamic changes. Although ESMs represent the forced thermodynamic warming well over WEU, they underestimate the circulation-induced warming that further reveals why ESMs underestimate the observed warming rate over WEU.Overall, these findings imply that if the circulation changes represent a forced response WEU continues to experience a severe intensification of heat extremes conditions in future as circulation-induced amplification of heat extremes may further intensify in the warmer world. Conversely, if the circulation-induced trend were due to internal variability, and thus would reverse in the coming decades, this would imply a somewhat slower rate of warming of heat extremes. Moreover, heat extremes over MUS continue to warm more slowly if circulation keeps dampening the warming effects in the coming decades, but potentially increase rapidly if the circulation trend reverses.

Parts of western North America experienced a heatwave in late June 2021that many would have conceived impossible based on observations so far. In Lytton, Canada, temperatures peaked at 49.6°C, and the area-average daily maximum temperature record across the Pacific Northwest was broken by nearly 5°C. Given the exceptional intensity of the eventsome media outlets and scientists raised the questions whether heat extremes intensify faster than previously projected based on climate models, or whether current generations of climate models miss crucial processes and are thus unable to even reproduce such an event.. Here I address these questions and highlight some of the challenges for widely methods in model evaluation and attribution.First, I review some of the recent literature detailing the key physical mechanisms driving the Pacific Northwest heatwave. I address some of the key scientific challenges regarding the quantification of return periods, event attribution, model evaluation and near-term projections. Widely used methods estimating stationary return periods based on the observational record up to the year before imply that such an event had an infinite return period, i.e., that it would never happen. Even when taking into account the non-stationarity of a warming climate, the exceedance probability would be zeroor nearly zero depending on the estimation of the confidence intervals, the duration of the event and whether the event itself is included in the fit. I discuss some potential ways forward in addressing the above challenges and in quantifying the potential intensity of record-shattering events in the near future.

Recent extreme temperature and precipitation events such as the dry and heat events in summer 2022 in Europe and China, the New Year’s warm spell 2022/23 across Europe, the 2021 heavy rainfall extremes in northwestern Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave broke previous observed record levels by large margins. The probability of such unprecedented record-shattering extremes increases with the rapid rate of warming. Thus, there is a crucial need for analyzing the underlying processes leading to these events and quantifying potential intensities of events possible in the coming decades.Here, we evaluate how ensemble boosting (Gessner et al. 2021 and Gessner et al. 2022) can help assess the tail of climate distributions and generate climate model-based storylines more resource-efficiently. In ensemble boosting the most extreme simulated events in an intermediate-size initial condition ensembles are re-initialized in targeted experiments in order to efficiently sample very extreme states of the model climatology. Here, we evaluate different ensemble design choices including lead time, ensemble size and potential iteration choices to most efficiently allocate computational resources to simulate events of very extreme intensity.The resulting boosted events are analyzed through a storyline approach, thus helping to interpret the underlying mechanisms of each physically consistent unfolding extreme event and its consequences. The Pacific Northwest heatwave in June 2021 will be used as a starting point; but ensemble boosting and storylines can be powerful tools for understanding extremes beyond heat. We further discuss how ensemble boosting can also be applied to compound extremes and future climate scenarios.

It comes as no surprise that the future holds record-breaking weather and climate events. As global warming continues, temperature records will continue to be broken. Also heavy precipitation records are likely to be broken due to the increased water holding capacity of the atmosphere, in combination with changing atmospheric stability and circulation patterns. Improved estimates on the range of possible record-breaking precipitation events – now and in the future – are a first step to inform adequate adaptation policies for heavy precipitation. Of particular interest are events that break records by large margins – record-shattering events –, since these are likely to incur most damage and losses. In order to improve estimates of record shattering precipitation events in the present and future climate we use initial condition large ensemble simulation data (CESM2, SSP370) and statistical models. We evaluate record-shattering events in Rx1d (day with most precipitation per chosen time period (year or season)). In a stationary climate, the probability of Rx1d record-breaking is known to decrease with the number of data points since the start of measurements (inversely proportional). We find, however, that in our nonstationary climate, the decay in Rx1d record breaking and shattering probability is slowed down and even reversed in most world regions. Regional changes in record shattering probability are attributable to a changing underlying probability distribution of Rx1d, which also is region specific. We elucidate the contributions of changes in mean (distribution shift), and in variability (distribution widening/narrowing) to increasing record shattering probability by using a statistical model to create counterfactual realities representative of the regions of interest.We focus on regions of a size relevant for national and cross-border policy that show differently driven changes in record shattering precipitation probabilities. For example, the annual probability of a record shattering precipitation event somewhere in the Benelux-Germany region which was hit by severe floods in summer 2021 increases from ~2% now to ~4.5% at the end of the century in CESM2. This increase results from a non-linear interaction between mean and variability increases, and is primarily driven by increasing variability. At lower latitudes, for example in Central America, the effect of variability is even stronger, where we find increasing record shattering probability despite a negative long-term trend in Rx1d levels.Very unlikely events are, paradoxically, arguably the most important to know about, since their unimaginability often means that critical infrastructure is not sized to withstand these events. Our results may thus prove invaluable for regional policy.

As in most countries in Europe, the 2022 summer in Switzerland was exceptionally hot, only comparable to the infamous 2003 summer, and particularly devastating in terms of excess health burden. Here we combine methods in climate epidemiology and attribution to quantify the mortality associated with heat and the contribution of human-induced climate change in the 2022 summer in Switzerland. We estimate 623 deaths [95% empirical confidence interval (95% eCI): 151 - 1,068] due to heat between June-August 2022, corresponding to 3.5% of all-cause mortality. More importantly, we find that 60% of this burden (370 deaths [95% eCI: 133-644]) could have been avoided in absence of human-induced climate change. Older women were affected the most, as well as populations in western and southern Switzerland and more urbanized areas. Our findings demonstrate that human-induced climate change was a relevant driver of the exceptional excess health burden observed in Switzerland.

Over the last 70 years, extreme heat has been increasing at global scale [1,2], with a rapid rate in several regions including Western Europe [3]. Climate models broadly capture heat trends globally [1], but exhibit systematically weaker extreme heat trends than observations in Western Europe [4-6], together with a weaker summer warming [7,8]. The causes of this mismatch, confirmed here by the analysis of 273 latest generation coupled climate simulations, among which only a handful of them overpass observed trends, are not well understood. Here we use a circulation analogue approach [9,10] to identify the dynamical contribution to temperature trends [11-12], and show that a substantial fraction (1.0°C [0.4°-1.6°C] of 3.4°C per global warming degree) of the trend is due to circulation changes, largely due to increases in southerly flows over Western Europe. Their rapid increase in frequency (+63% [20%-106%] since 1950) and persistence (+45% [12%-77%]) are not captured by any of the 32 climate model flow simulations analyzed. The few simulations reaching the observed warming trends in extreme heat have weak dynamical changes, with a decrease in occurrence of southerly flows, indicating that they capture the warming trend for the wrong reasons. These model biases in circulation trends can be due to a systematically underestimated or erroneous representation of the circulation response to external forcing, or to a systematic underestimation of interdecadal variability, or both. The former implies that projections are too conservative, the latter that we are left with deep uncertainty regarding the pace of future summer heat in Europe: the current strong recent trend could weaken or increase in future decades. This calls for caution when interpreting climate projections of heat extremes over Western Europe, in particular in view of adaptation to heat waves.

Although richness and distribution of woody species in the Cerrado physiognomies have been extensively studied, the shifts of woody species from savanna physiognomies to dry forests have not yet been addressed. Here, we investigate the effect of soil physical-chemical traits on the woody species turnover between adjacent cerrado stricto sensu and dry forest physiognomies. Woody species were surveyed, and soil and topographic variables measured, in 30 10×40 m plots systematically distributed, with 15 plots in each physiognomy. We found a spatially structured distribution of woody species, and differences of soil traits between cerrado stricto sensu and dry forest areas, mainly related to the aluminum saturation, base saturation, and available phosphorus. Aluminum saturation increased toward the savanna area, while base saturation increased toward the dry forest. Most woody species predominated in one physiognomy, such as Callisthene major in the cerrado stricto sensu and Anadenanthera colubrina in the dry forest. Only 20% of the species were widely distributed across both physiognomies or, not often, restricted to the intermediary values of the soil gradient. General results indicate that contrasting soil traits between cerrado stricto sensu and dry forest produce a strongly spatially organized and sharp transition in terms of species distribution between these physiognomies. Resumo Embora a distribuição e a riqueza em espécies arbóreas nas fitofisionomias do Cerrado venham sendo bastante estudadas, a transição entre savanas e florestas deciduais ainda não foi abordada. Investigamos o efeito de características físico-químicas do solo sobre a distribuição de espécies arbóreas em região de contato entre cerrado sentido restrito e floresta estacional decidual (FED). As espécies arbóreas foram amostradas sistematicamente, e variáveis de topografia e características do solo foram medidas em 30 parcelas de 10×40 m, sendo 15 parcelas em cada fisionomia. A distribuição das espécies arbóreas foi espacialmente estruturada, e as características do solo diferiram entre as áreas de cerrado sentido restrito e FED, principalmente relacionadas à saturação de alumínio, saturação de bases e teores de fósforo. A saturação de alumínio aumentou em direção ao cerrado sentido restrito, enquanto a saturação de bases aumentou em direção à FED. A maioria das espécies arbóreas predominou em uma das fisionomias, como Callisthene major em cerrado sentido restrito e Anadenanthera colubrina em FED. Apenas 20% das espécies foram amplamente distribuídas em ambas as fisionomias ou, em poucos casos, restritas aos valores intermediários do gradiente de solo. Os resultados indicam um forte contraste de características do solo entre o cerrado sentido restrito e a FED, assim como uma transição acentuada e espacialmente organizada quanto à distribuição de espécies arbóreas.

Made available in DSpace on 2022-04-29T08:34:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2021-01-01 Mites of the family Melicharidae comprise 13 genera and 220 species often associated with edaphic environments and found in association with insects, birds and mammals. Two genera, Proctolaelaps and Tropicoseius, have been recorded in Brazil in association with birds and bromeliads. In this study, we add new locality and host-association records for Proctolaelaps superagui and Tropicoseius braziliensis in the country. Laboratório de Coleções Zoológicas Instituto Butantan Departamento de Patologia Reprodução e Saúde Única Faculdade de Ciências Agrárias e Veterinárias-UNESP Laboratório de Ecologia Instituto de Biologia Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul Museu Biológico Instituto Butantan Independent Researcher Departamento de Entomologia e Acarologia ESALQ-Universidade de São Paulo Department of Entomology University of Arkansas Departamento de Patologia Reprodução e Saúde Única Faculdade de Ciências Agrárias e Veterinárias-UNESP

The evolution of bat skull has been extensively studied at a broad scale. However, we know little about how phenotypes that evolved in response to selective pressure elsewhere interact with ecological pressures to determine species co-ocurrence in human-modified landscapes. Here, we test the influence of size, diet, and foraging strategy on the skull and jaw shape of 32 co-occurring bat species in an agroecological landscape from southwestern Brazil. We used 2D geometric morphometrics for skull and jaw and phylogenetic comparative methods to integrate morphology, ecology, and phylogeny data. Our results show that closely related species were clustered together in the morphospace. Likewise, ecology and phylogeny influenced the cranial and jaw shape. Groups with greater phenotypic disparity were animalivores and insectivores. The skull of frugivores and animalivores were larger than that of insectivores and had a common and positive allometric relationship, probably related to olfactory-visual senses. Apparently, coexistence in Stenodermatinae frugivores is possible because they have optimal phenotypes for exploration food resources related to the skull and jaw size. Conversely, insectivores that clustered together in the morphospace had differences in foraging strategy or size.

Heat-related mortality has been identified as one of the key climate extremes posing a risk to human health. Current research focuses largely on how heat mortality increases with mean global temperature rise, but it is unclear how much climate change will increase the frequency and severity of extreme summer seasons with high impact on human health. In this probabilistic analysis, we combined empirical heat-mortality relationships for 748 locations from 47 countries with climate model large ensemble data to identify probable past and future highly impactful summer seasons. Across most locations, heat mortality counts of a 1-in-100 year season in the climate of 2000 would be expected once every ten to twenty years in the climate of 2020. These return periods are projected to further shorten under warming levels of 1.5°C and 2°C, where heat-mortality extremes of the past climate will eventually become commonplace if no adaptation occurs. Our findings highlight the urgent need for strong mitigation and adaptation to reduce impacts on human lives.

Most Asteraceae species are pollinated by insects, mainly bees and butterflies, although pollination by birds has been documented and pollination by bats has been suggested for some species. Here, we investigated the pollination of Gongylolepis martiana, a species supposedly pollinated by bats. We assessed floral traits and visitors in a population of G. martiana in the Brazilian Amazon, measuring pollen removal from anthers and deposition on stigmas by diurnal and nocturnal visitors. Florets opened at dusk and lasted for 4 days, with the male phase starting on the first night and the female phase on the third night. Accumulated nectar per capitulum was 69.6 μl per night and sugar concentration was 15%. Nectar-feeding bats and hummingbirds contacted the sexual parts, but pollen removal and deposition were greater throughout the night than during the day, when Meliponini bees considerably reduced pollen availability. Other nocturnal visitors of G. martiana were rare, including nocturnal bees and moths that foraged for pollen and nectar, respectively. Our results support that nectarivorous bats are the main pollinators of G. martiana, confirming Vogel's hypothesis of bat pollination in Asteraceae, particularly in the genus Gongylolepis. Since anthesis and each sexual floral phase started in the evening, nectarivorous bats and diurnal bees caused additive priority effects, preventing hummingbirds from being efficient pollinators. The high density of flowering individuals of G. martiana in patches from white-sand forests likely increases bat attraction, while the small amount of nectar per plant favours cross-pollination.

Storylines provide a way to communicate climate change and especially changes in extreme events in a tangible way for the public and decision makers by putting the focus on associated risks and impacts. In this work, storylines are created for the 2003 summer heatwave in Switzerland. For this purpose, an analogous event is searched for in the already existing Climate Scenarios for Switzerland (CH2018). This event shall be as extreme in the future climate as 2003 was in its time. Building storylines for this future extreme event, we demonstrate how a 2003-like summer might be like by the end of the Century assuming no climate change mitigation. Specific indicators are chosen to develop four individual heat-related storylines and enabling a direct comparison between 2003 and the future hot summer. For the future summer, the number of hiking weather days in the Alps is projected to increase on the one hand, while on the other hand also fire danger increases massively. More and longer heatwaves may aggravate heat-related health issues and additional generations of agricultural pests could threaten agricultural yields.With these storylines of a similar future heatwave, we gain a better understanding of locally relevant processes, get insight into how extreme events quantitatively change with the warming climate, give examples of possible impacts, and finally try to stimulate public awareness for possible consequences of future climate change. We explore different ways of visualizing and communicating the results, which may find broader application to inform Swiss stakeholders about future climate change and its possible impacts.