Limitations of Water Resources Infrastructure for Reducing Community Vulnerabilities to Extremes and Uncertainty of Flood and Drought

Debate and deliberation surrounding climate change has shifted from mitigation toward adaptation, with much of the adaptation focus centered on adaptive practices, and infrastructure development. However, there is little research assessing expected impacts, potential benefits, and design challenges that exist for reducing vulnerability to expected climate impacts. The uncertainty of design requirements and associated government policies, and social structures that reflect observed and projected changes in the intensity, duration, and frequency of water-related climate events leaves communities vulnerable to the negative impacts of potential flood and drought. The results of international research into how agricultural infrastructure features in current and planned adaptive capacity of rural communities in Argentina, Canada, and Colombia indicate that extreme hydroclimatic events, as well as climate variability and unpredictability are important for understanding and responding to community vulnerability. The research outcomes clearly identify the need to deliberately plan, coordinate, and implement infrastructures that support community resiliency.Fil: McMartin, Dena W.. University of Regina; CanadáFil: Hernani Merino, Bruno H.. University of Regina; CanadáFil: Bonsal, Barrie. Environment Canada; CanadáFil: Hurlbert, Margot. University of Regina; CanadáFil: Villalba, Ricardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Regional de Investigaciones Cientifícas y Tecnológicas; ArgentinaFil: Ocampo, Olga L.. Universidad Autónoma de Manizales; ColombiaFil: Upegui, Jorge Julián Vélez. Universidad Nacional de Colombia; ColombiaFil: Poveda, Germán. Universidad Nacional de Colombia; ColombiaFil: Sauchyn, David J.. University of Regina; Canad

Coherent streamflow variability in Monsoon Asia over the past eight centuries—links to oceanic drivers

Ten of the world's biggest rivers are located entirely within the Asian Monsoon region. They provide water, energy, and food for 1.7 billion people. To manage these critical resources, we need a better understanding of river discharge—how does it change over a long time? Are there common variation patterns among rivers? To answer these questions, we use information derived from tree rings to reconstruct average annual river discharge history at 62 gauges in 16 Asian countries. Our reconstruction reveals the riparian footprint of megadroughts and large volcanic eruptions over the past eight centuries. We show that simultaneous droughts and pluvials have often occurred at adjacent river basins in the past, because Asian rivers share common influences from the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans. We also show how these oceanic teleconnections change over space and time. Our findings can inform big decisions made on water-dependent infrastructure, thus benefiting the riparian people of the Asian Monsoon region

The First Millennium-Age Araucaria Araucana in Patagonia

This item is part of the Tree-Ring Research (formerly Tree-Ring Bulletin) archive. For more information about this peer-reviewed scholarly journal, please email the Editor of Tree-Ring Research at [email protected]

Movement of pulsed resource subsidies from kelp forests to deep fjords

Resource subsidies in the form of allochthonous primary production drive secondary production in many ecosystems, often sustaining diversity and overall productivity. Despite their importance in structuring marine communities, there is little understanding of how subsidies move through juxtaposed habitats and into recipient communities. We investigated the transport of detritus from kelp forests to a deep Arctic fjord (northern Norway). We quantified the seasonal abundance and size structure of kelp detritus in shallow subtidal (0‒12 m), deep subtidal (12‒85 m), and deep fjord (400‒450 m) habitats using a combination of camera surveys, dive observations, and detritus collections over 1 year. Detritus formed dense accumulations in habitats adjacent to kelp forests, and the timing of depositions coincided with the discrete loss of whole kelp blades during spring. We tracked these blades through the deep subtidal and into the deep fjord, and showed they act as a short-term resource pulse transported over several weeks. In deep subtidal regions, detritus consisted mostly of fragments and its depth distribution was similar across seasons (50% of total observations). Tagged pieces of detritus moved slowly out of kelp forests (displaced 4‒50 m (mean 11.8 m ± 8.5 SD) in 11‒17 days, based on minimum estimates from recovered pieces), and most (75%) variability in the rate of export was related to wave exposure and substrate. Tight resource coupling between kelp forests and deep fjords indicate that changes in kelp abundance would propagate through to deep fjord ecosystems, with likely consequences for the ecosystem functioning and services they provide.acceptedVersio

Data descriptor: a global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850-2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high-and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python. (TABLE) Since the pioneering work of D'Arrigo and Jacoby1-3, as well as Mann et al. 4,5, temperature reconstructions of the Common Era have become a key component of climate assessments6-9. Such reconstructions depend strongly on the composition of the underlying network of climate proxies10, and it is therefore critical for the climate community to have access to a community-vetted, quality-controlled database of temperature-sensitive records stored in a self-describing format. The Past Global Changes (PAGES) 2k consortium, a self-organized, international group of experts, recently assembled such a database, and used it to reconstruct surface temperature over continental-scale regions11 (hereafter, ` PAGES2k-2013'). This data descriptor presents version 2.0.0 of the PAGES2k proxy temperature database (Data Citation 1). It augments the PAGES2k-2013 collection of terrestrial records with marine records assembled by the Ocean2k working group at centennial12 and annual13 time scales. In addition to these previously published data compilations, this version includes substantially more records, extensive new metadata, and validation. Furthermore, the selection criteria for records included in this version are applied more uniformly and transparently across regions, resulting in a more cohesive data product. This data descriptor describes the contents of the database, the criteria for inclusion, and quantifies the relation of each record with instrumental temperature. In addition, the paleotemperature time series are summarized as composites to highlight the most salient decadal-to centennial-scale behaviour of the dataset and check mutual consistency between paleoclimate archives. We provide extensive Matlab code to probe the database-processing, filtering and aggregating it in various ways to investigate temperature variability over the Common Era. The unique approach to data stewardship and code-sharing employed here is designed to enable an unprecedented scale of investigation of the temperature history of the Common Era, by the scientific community and citizen-scientists alike

Data Descriptor: A global multiproxy database for temperature reconstructions of the Common Era

Reproducible climate reconstructions of the Common Era (1 CE to present) are key to placing industrial-era warming into the context of natural climatic variability. Here we present a community-sourced database of temperature-sensitive proxy records from the PAGES2k initiative. The database gathers 692 records from 648 locations, including all continental regions and major ocean basins. The records are from trees, ice, sediment, corals, speleothems, documentary evidence, and other archives. They range in length from 50 to 2000 years, with a median of 547 years, while temporal resolution ranges from biweekly to centennial. Nearly half of the proxy time series are significantly correlated with HadCRUT4.2 surface temperature over the period 1850-2014. Global temperature composites show a remarkable degree of coherence between high-and low-resolution archives, with broadly similar patterns across archive types, terrestrial versus marine locations, and screening criteria. The database is suited to investigations of global and regional temperature variability over the Common Era, and is shared in the Linked Paleo Data (LiPD) format, including serializations in Matlab, R and Python.(TABLE)Since the pioneering work of D'Arrigo and Jacoby1-3, as well as Mann et al. 4,5, temperature reconstructions of the Common Era have become a key component of climate assessments6-9. Such reconstructions depend strongly on the composition of the underlying network of climate proxies10, and it is therefore critical for the climate community to have access to a community-vetted, quality-controlled database of temperature-sensitive records stored in a self-describing format. The Past Global Changes (PAGES) 2k consortium, a self-organized, international group of experts, recently assembled such a database, and used it to reconstruct surface temperature over continental-scale regions11 (hereafter, ` PAGES2k-2013').This data descriptor presents version 2.0.0 of the PAGES2k proxy temperature database (Data Citation 1). It augments the PAGES2k-2013 collection of terrestrial records with marine records assembled by the Ocean2k working group at centennial12 and annual13 time scales. In addition to these previously published data compilations, this version includes substantially more records, extensive new metadata, and validation. Furthermore, the selection criteria for records included in this version are applied more uniformly and transparently across regions, resulting in a more cohesive data product.This data descriptor describes the contents of the database, the criteria for inclusion, and quantifies the relation of each record with instrumental temperature. In addition, the paleotemperature time series are summarized as composites to highlight the most salient decadal-to centennial-scale behaviour of the dataset and check mutual consistency between paleoclimate archives. We provide extensive Matlab code to probe the database-processing, filtering and aggregating it in various ways to investigate temperature variability over the Common Era. The unique approach to data stewardship and code-sharing employed here is designed to enable an unprecedented scale of investigation of the temperature history of the Common Era, by the scientific community and citizen-scientists alike