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Major Drought (major + drought)
Selected AbstractsResponse of the flora and macroinvertebrate fauna of a chalk stream site to changes in managementFRESHWATER BIOLOGY, Issue 5 2003J. F. Wright SUMMARY 1. Temporal changes in a series of habitats and their macroinvertebrate assemblages were examined on a 50-m section of a chalk stream in Berkshire, England between June 1975,79 and June 1997,2001. 2. The site was part of a trout fishery in 1975,79, when river management included instream weed cutting together with control of bankside trees and riparian vegetation. Management ceased in the 1980s and by 1997,2001, the site was heavily shaded by trees and riparian vegetation. 3. The mean area of instream macrophytes decreased by 50% between the first and second sampling period. In contrast, gravel and silt increased and invading marginal vegetation formed a new habitat. 4. Changes in macroinvertebrate family richness between sampling periods were scale dependant. Although there were, on average, significantly more families in individual replicates in 1975,79 than in 1997,2001, total family richness for the site in each year did not differ significantly between sampling periods. 5. Sixty families of macroinvertebrates were recorded during the study, 50 in both sampling periods, 53 in 1975,79 and 57 in 1997,2001. This small increase in site family richness may be due to the invading marginal plants. 6. Total macroinvertebrate abundance was significantly lower in the second sampling period. A major drought in 1976 resulted in significantly higher densities of macroinvertebrates, partly through the exploitation of epiphytic diatoms by chironomid larvae. A drought in 1997 failed to elicit a similar response because of the limited macrophytes and diatoms under heavy shading by trees and marginal vegetation. 7. Significant increases in important shredders and decreases in some scrapers between the early and later sampling years largely reflected changes in available food resources. 8. Whereas macroinvertebrate family richness has been conserved under the recent ,no management' regime, the site is now less attractive as a fishery because of poor access and lower densities of some macroinvertebrates taken by brown trout. [source] Multi-annual dry episodes in Australian climatic variabilityINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLIMATOLOGY, Issue 12 2009B. G. Hunt Abstract The output from a 10 000-year simulation with the CSIRO Mark 2 coupled global climatic model has been analysed to investigate the occurrence of multi-year dry episodes for three selected regions of Australia, specifically, the northeast, southeast and southwest of the continent. Results are presented for dry episodes lasting for 8 or more years. An episode is defined as a time interval having consecutive negative rainfall anomalies, but not necessarily a major drought, for each year of the episode. The hydrological consequences of such an episode can persist for over a century. Typically about 30 episodes are found over the 10 000 years of the simulation for each of the three regions. There is little synchronicity between the regions in the occurrence of the dry episodes. While there is an El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influence associated with these episodes, it is not continuous over the duration of an episode. Composites of sea surface temperature anomalies over an episode highlight the limited presence of ENSO events. The occurrence of the dry episodes for all three regions is essentially random, with multi-centennial periods without an episode, and episodes at multi-decadal frequency at other times. Following a discussion of possible mechanistic influences, it is concluded that stochastic forcing is responsible for the occurrence of dry episodes. This implies that there is no predictability associated with the initiation, duration or termination of individual dry episodes. This also suggests that the 2000,2007 dry episodes occurring over much of Australia may not be caused by the greenhouse effect. Such an episode has a return period of between 200 and 300 years based on the mean frequency of occurrence in the present simulation. Copyright © 2008 Royal Meteorological Society [source] Modelling climate change in West African Sahel rainfall (1931,90) as an artifact of changing station locationsINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLIMATOLOGY, Issue 5 2004Adrian Chappell Abstract Since the major droughts in the West African Sahel during the 1970s, it has been widely asserted that mean annual summer rainfall has declined since the late 1960s. Explanation of this persistent regional drying trend was important for famine early-warning and global climate models. However, the network of rainfall stations changed considerably during that recent period of desiccation. Furthermore, it was difficult to reconcile the calculation of a simple mean value for a region known to have a complex spatial and temporal rainfall pattern. A simple model separated the Sahel into ,wet' and ,dry' regions. This model was inverted against mean annual summer rainfall for the Sahel between 1931 and 1990. Model predictions were found to be insensitive to initial starting conditions. The optimized parameters explained 87% of the variation in observed mean annual summer rainfall. The model predicted the mean annual rainfall in the wet ,coastal' and dry ,continental' regions of the Sahel to be 973 mm and 142 mm respectively. Consequently, the predicted long-term mean annual summer rainfall was 558 mm, 15% greater than that of the observed long-term mean (417 mm). The mean annual summer rainfall for the region was corrected by removing the influence of changing station locations over the study period. No persistent decline was found in mean annual summer rainfall, which suggested that the perceived drying trend was an artifact of the crude statistical aggregation of the data and historical changes in the climate station networks. The absence of a decline in rainfall questioned the validity of the hypotheses and speculations for the causes of the drying trend in the region and its effects on global climate change. It also increased the likelihood that changes over time in other regional and global climate station networks have influenced the performance and interpretation of global climate models. Copyright © 2004 Royal Meteorological Society [source] Invasive Africanized honey bee impact on native solitary bees: a pollen resource and trap nest analysisBIOLOGICAL JOURNAL OF THE LINNEAN SOCIETY, Issue 1 2009DAVID W. ROUBIK Little is known of the potential coevolution of flowers and bees in changing, biodiverse environments. Female solitary bees, megachilids and Centris, and their nest pollen provisions were monitored with trap nests over a 17-year period in a tropical Mexican biosphere reserve. Invasion by feral Apis (i.e. Africanized honey bees) occurred after the study began, and major droughts and hurricanes occurred throughout. Honey bee competition, and ostensibly pollination of native plants, caused changes in local pollination ecology. Shifts in floral hosts by native bees were common and driven by plant phylogenetics, whereby plants of the same families or higher taxa were substituted for those dominated by honey bees or lost as a result of natural processes. Two important plant families, Anacardiaceae and Euphorbiaceae, were lost to competing honey bees, but compensated for by greater use of Fabaceae, Rubiaceae, and Sapotaceae among native bees. Natural disasters made a large negative impact on native bee populations, but the sustained presence of Africanized honey bees did not. Over 171 plant species comprised the pollen diets of the honey bees, including those most important to Centris and megachilids (72 and 28 species, respectively). Honey bee pollination of Pouteria (Sapotaceae) plausibly augmented the native bees' primary pollen resource and prevented their decline. Invasive generalist pollinators may, however, cause specialized competitors to fail, especially in less biodiverse environments. No claim to original US government works. Journal compilation © 2009 The Linnean Society of London, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 2009, 98, 152,160. [source] | ||||||||||