Ecophysiology articles from across Nature Portfolio

Climate change is exacerbating the severity of drought for life on land, especially for drying-sensitive species such as anurans (frogs and toads). Evaporative water loss rates for anurans are expected to double in areas with increased aridity. Increased drought severity combined with climate warming will likely reduce activity time for anurans owing to physiological limits.

Analysis of the FLUXNET2015 dataset provides observational evidence for widespread thermal acclimation of canopy-scale photosynthesis and its timescales across diverse biomes, improving its representation in land surface models.

Through their effects on soil hydraulic properties, soil texture and sand content are shown to have broad implications for the terrestrial water cycle and carbon sink, and specific implications for vital ecosystems that are vulnerable to drought, especially with changing climate.

Climate change is exacerbating the severity of drought for life on land, especially for drying-sensitive species such as anurans (frogs and toads). Evaporative water loss rates for anurans are expected to double in areas with increased aridity. Increased drought severity combined with climate warming will likely reduce activity time for anurans owing to physiological limits.

Our extensive, multi-year regional study reveals that prolonged exposure to heavy wildfire smoke results in significant and persistent reductions in non-structural carbohydrates in trees, and that these effects continue for months following the fires (including into the dormancy period and next season’s bloom). Furthermore, trees that are subjected to high levels of smoke exhibit substantial yield reductions in the following year.

Although generally presented otherwise organic agriculture (OA) is much less productive per unit area of land than conventional agriculture (CA) for two reasons. First, because the yields of individual crops grown in OA are generally less than those in CA. Second, because the reliance in OA on organic fertilizer, i.e. plant and animal manures, requires that additional land grown to legumes to provide nitrogen (N) must be included in the calculation of relative productivity. Compared with the commonly used crop-yield ratios of OA/CA productivity of 0.75–0.81, new analyses of the relative food productivity of various crop- and crop-livestock systems presented here report lower values in the range 0.30–0.74 with many less than 0.5. The OA/CA system ratios are higher in less favourable areas and lower in productive areas more suited to crop intensification. The implications for food security and nature conservation place OA at a disadvantage because transformation to OA would require substantial expansion of agricultural land, e.g. an OA/CA ratio of 0.5, would require a doubling of area under OA to maintain equal production. By contrast, higher yields in CA reduce the demand for land in agriculture and consequently can conserve land for nature.

The concept that planting trees will help mitigate climate change by storing CO₂ is too simplistic, ignoring the large effect that plants have on the water cycle. Careful restoration of native plant ecosystems can rebalance that cycle, further mitigating climate change while also reducing flood and drought extremes.

An endangered turtle population translocated to a higher-latitude (cooler) location grew inadequately. This calls into question the future viability of the population and highlights the difficulties in carrying out climate change-related translocations.