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Small island developing states in the Caribbean are among the most vulnerable countries on the planet to climate variability and climate change. In the last 3 decades, the Caribbean region has undergone frequent and intense heat waves, storms, floods, and droughts. This has had a detrimental impact on population health and well-being, including an increase in infectious disease outbreaks. Recent advances in climate science have enhanced our ability to anticipate hydrometeorological hazards and associated public health challenges. Here, we discuss progress towards bridging the gap between climate science and public health decision-making in the Caribbean to build health system resilience to extreme climatic events. We focus on the development of climate services to help manage mosquito-transmitted disease epidemics. There are numerous areas of ongoing biological research aimed at better understanding the direct and indirect impacts of climate change on the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases. Here, we emphasise additional factors that affect our ability to operationalise this biological understanding. We highlight a lack of financial resources, technical expertise, data sharing, and formalised partnerships between climate and health communities as major limiting factors to developing sustainable climate services for health. Recommendations include investing in integrated climate, health and mosquito surveillance systems, building regional and local human resource capacities, and designing national and regional cross-sectoral policies and national action plans. This will contribute towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and maximising regional development partnerships and co-benefits for improved health and well-being in the Caribbean. This Perspective article discusses progress towards bridging the gap between climate science and public health decision-making, highlighting the importance of multi-institutional and interdisciplinary collaborations to develop early warning systems for arboviral diseases in the Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the management and preservation of species and the ecosystem, a new approach in freshwater fish conservation and the life trajectory of a jaguar.

Bigger is apparently frequently fitter, and body size is typically heritable, so why don’t animals in wild populations evolve towards larger sizes? Different explanations have been proposed for this apparent “paradox of stasis.” A new study of snow voles in the Swiss Alps finds higher survival in animals with larger body mass and heritability of body mass, but, surprisingly, a genetic decline in body mass is also indicated. The authors suggest a novel explanation for this observation: the appearance of positive phenotypic selection is driven by a confounding variable of the age at which a juvenile is measured, whereas the evolutionarily relevant selection actually acts negatively on mass via its association with development time. Thus, genes for larger mass are not actually “fitter” because they are associated with longer development times, and juvenile snow voles with longer development times run the risk of not completing development before the first winter snow. However, the genetic decline in body size is not apparent at the phenotypic level, presumably because of countervailing trends in environmental effects on the phenotype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current climate change may be a major threat to global biodiversity, but the extent of species loss will depend on the details of how species respond to changing climates. For example, if most species can undergo rapid change in their climatic niches, then extinctions may be limited. Numerous studies have now documented shifts in the geographic ranges of species that were inferred to be related to climate change, especially shifts towards higher mean elevations and latitudes. Many of these studies contain valuable data on extinctions of local populations that have not yet been thoroughly explored. Specifically, overall range shifts can include range contractions at the “warm edges” of species’ ranges (i.e., lower latitudes and elevations), contractions which occur through local extinctions. Here, data on climate-related range shifts were used to test the frequency of local extinctions related to recent climate change. The results show that climate-related local extinctions have already occurred in hundreds of species, including 47% of the 976 species surveyed. This frequency of local extinctions was broadly similar across climatic zones, clades, and habitats but was significantly higher in tropical species than in temperate species (55% versus 39%), in animals than in plants (50% versus 39%), and in freshwater habitats relative to terrestrial and marine habitats (74% versus 46% versus 51%). Overall, these results suggest that local extinctions related to climate change are already widespread, even though levels of climate change so far are modest relative to those predicted in the next 100 years. These extinctions will presumably become much more prevalent as global warming increases further by roughly 2-fold to 5-fold over the coming decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud cover can influence numerous important ecological processes, including reproduction, growth, survival, and behavior, yet our assessment of its importance at the appropriate spatial scales has remained remarkably limited. If captured over a large extent yet at sufficiently fine spatial grain, cloud cover dynamics may provide key information for delineating a variety of habitat types and predicting species distributions. Here, we develop new near-global, fine-grain (≈1 km) monthly cloud frequencies from 15 y of twice-daily Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite images that expose spatiotemporal cloud cover dynamics of previously undocumented global complexity. We demonstrate that cloud cover varies strongly in its geographic heterogeneity and that the direct, observation-based nature of cloud-derived metrics can improve predictions of habitats, ecosystem, and species distributions with reduced spatial autocorrelation compared to commonly used interpolated climate data. These findings support the fundamental role of remote sensing as an effective lens through which to understand and globally monitor the fine-grain spatial variability of key biodiversity and ecosystem properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

: The effects on survival of species-species interaction in the face of a changing climate depend on whether the species' interests are conflicting or non-conflicting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new method to compare amphibian, bird, and mammal beta-diversity within the Western Hemisphere reveals that areas of high beta-diversity coincide, with implications for understanding regional diversity patterns and for conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how climatic change impacts biological diversity is critical to conservation. Yet despite demonstrated effects of climatic perturbation on geographic ranges and population persistence, surprisingly little is known of the genetic response of species. Even less is known over ecologically long time scales pertinent to understanding the interplay between microevolution and environmental change. Here, we present a study of population variation by directly tracking genetic change and population size in two geographically widespread mammal species (Microtus montanus and Thomomys tolpoides) during late-Holocene climatic change. We use ancient DNA to compare two independent estimates of population size (ecological and genetic) and corroborate our results with gene diversity and serial coalescent simulations. Our data and analyses indicate that, with population size decreasing at times of climatic change, some species will exhibit declining gene diversity as expected from simple population genetic models, whereas others will not. While our results could be consistent with selection, independent lines of evidence implicate differences in gene flow, which depends on the life history strategy of species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the role of slowing tropical deforestation in mitigating climate change. The research also suggests that a key group of countries are at risk of being omitted from a new framework, those with high forest cover and low rates of deforestation (HFLD). HFLD countries would receive a significant incentive to maintain low rates of deforestation from any reference emission rate indexed to the global average.