Letters in 2016

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  • Increasing dry season length in central Panama reduced population growth rates and viability in nearly one-third of the 20 tropical bird species investigated. Such changes are projected to alter tropical bird community structure in protected areas.

    • Jeffrey D. Brawn
    • Thomas J. Benson
    • Corey E. Tarwater
    Letter
  • Five equitable approaches to mitigation are investigated: the authors find that most developing countries are more ambitious than the average, whilst if developed nations and China adopted the average of the approaches the gap between INDCs and a 2 °C pathway would narrow.

    • Yann Robiou du Pont
    • M. Louise Jeffery
    • Malte Meinshausen
    Letter
  • Climate change is causing increases in extreme rainfall across the United States. This study uses observations and high-resolution modelling to show that rainfall changes related to rising temperatures depend on the available atmospheric moisture.

    • Andreas F. Prein
    • Roy M. Rasmussen
    • Greg J. Holland
    Letter
  • Global high-resolution crop-specific estimates of greenhouse gas emissions intensity (in 2000) reveal that certain cropping practices contribute disproportionately to emissions, making them suitable targets for climate mitigation policies.

    • Kimberly M. Carlson
    • James S. Gerber
    • Paul C. West
    Letter
  • Projected decreases in subtropical rainfall have previously been attributed to enhanced moisture transport or atmospheric circulation changes. New research shows that neither is the key mechanism, and instead greater land–sea temperature contrast in response to direct radiative forcing dominates.

    • Jie He
    • Brian J. Soden
    Letter
  • Aquifer characteristics and water use data for 43 widely distributed small island states indicate that 44% are in a state of water stress. While recharge is projected to increase on 12 islands it is projected to decrease by up to 58% on the other 31.

    • S. Holding
    • D. M. Allen
    • S. C. Van Pelt
    Letter
  • Climate change is expected to lead to significant changes in phylogenetic diversity and endemism at a continental scale in Australia, threatening the hyper-diverse clade of eucalypt trees that dominate much of the continent.

    • Carlos E. González-Orozco
    • Laura J. Pollock
    • Bernd Gruber
    Letter
  • Assessment of the emergence of novel climatic combinations, rapid displacement of climatic isoclines, and divergence between temperature and precipitation trends provides an indication of where and why novel communities are likely to emerge.

    • Alejandro Ordonez
    • John W. Williams
    • Jens-Christian Svenning
    Letter
  • Remote sensing of tropical forest activity indicates that temporal autocorrelation—an indicator of slow recovery from stress—rises steeply as precipitation falls sufficiently. This offers some support for a tipping point for forest collapse.

    • Jan Verbesselt
    • Nikolaus Umlauf
    • Marten Scheffer
    Letter
  • Application of a terrestrial biogeochemical model that simulates diverse forest communities suggests that plant trait diversity may enable the Amazon rainforest to adjust to new climate conditions via a process of ecological sorting.

    • Boris Sakschewski
    • Werner von Bloh
    • Kirsten Thonicke
    Letter