Search

Introduction: For 28 years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been assessing the potential risks associated with anthropogenic climate change. Although interest in climate change and health is growing, the implications arising from their interaction remain understudied. Generating a greater understanding of the health impacts of climate change could be key step in inciting some of the changes necessary to decelerate global warming. A long-term and broad overview of the existing scientific literature in the field of climate change and health is currently missing in order to ensure that all priority areas are being adequately addressed. In this paper we outline our methods to conduct a scoping review of the published peer-reviewed literature on climate change and health between 1990 and 2015., Methods and Analysis: A detailed search strategy will be used to search the PubMed and Web of Science databases. Specific inclusion and exclusion criteria will be applied in order to capture the most relevant literature in the time frame chosen. Data will be extracted, categorised and coded to allow for statistical analysis of the results., Ethics and Dissemination: No ethical approval was required for this study. A searchable database of climate change and health publications will be developed and a manuscript will be complied for publication and dissemination of the findings. We anticipate that this study will allow us to map the trends observed in publications over the 25-year time period in climate change and health research. It will also identify the research areas with the highest volume of publications as well as highlight the research trends in climate change and health., Competing Interests: Conflicts of Interest: None declared., (Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://www.bmj.com/company/products-services/rights-and-licensing/.)

There is much interest in predicting the impact of global warming on the genetic diversity of natural populations and the influence of climate on biodiversity is an important ecological question. Since Holocene, we face many climate perturbations and the geographical ranges of plant taxa have changed substantially. Actual genetic diversity of plant is a result of these processes and a first step to study the impact of future climate change is to understand the important features of reconstructed climate variables such as temperature or precipitation for the last 15,000 years on actual genetic diversity of forest. We model the relationship between genetic diversity in the European beech (Fagus sylvatica) forests and curves of temperature and precipitation reconstructed from pollen databases. Our model links the genetic measure to the climate curves. We adapt classical functional linear model to take into account interactions between climate variables as a bilinear form. Since the data are georeferenced, our extensions also account for the spatial dependence among the observations. The practical issues of these methodological extensions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the last glacial maximum (LGM; 18,000 years. bp) plants migrated onto areas made free by the retreating ice sheets. Pollen records document changes in ecosystems and are an important proxy for the reconstruction of climate parameters. Here, we quantify changes in January temperature (Tjan) over the past 14,000 years using 216 European pollen records. We used functional principal component analysis to evaluate the patterns of change over this period of time. Between 14 and 12 ka, Tjan records show comparable changes across Europe. After this time period, northwest and southeast Europe experienced differing trends in Tjan, trends that became pronounced by 9 ka. The spatial gradient of Tjan records is well-correlated with the overall change from steppe to increasingly diverse forest ecosystems. In particular, differential incorporation of conifer vs. deciduous species into forest ecosystems, based on differential colonization out of refugia, likely resulted in albedo gradients over Europe that affected regional Tjan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]