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Pynnonen 1990 Physiological Responses.pdf
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PEK-RIC
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Pynnonen 1990.pdf
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PEK-RIC
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Pynnonen 1990s.pdf
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PEK-RIC
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Pynnonen 1991.pdf
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Quail Forever
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Quail Forever is dedicated to the conservation of quail, pheasants and other wildlife through habitat improvements, public awareness, education, and land management policies and programs.
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Quail Forever Hires Lauren Stamm as Southwest Regional Rep
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Quail Forever is proud to announce the hiring of Lauren Stamm as a regional representative in the southwest United States. In her new role, Stamm will provide support for dedicated members and volunteers throughout Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico, working closely with local chapters to improve public and private lands conservation efforts for quail and other wildlife.
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Quantifying the benefit of early climate change mitigation in avoiding biodiversity loss
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Climate change is expected to have significant influences on terrestrial biodiversity at all system levels, including species-level reductions in range size and abundance, especially amongst endemic species1–6. However, little is known about how mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions could reduce biodiversity impacts, particularly amongst common and widespread species. Our global analysis of future climatic range change of common and widespread species shows that without mitigation, 57 ± 6% of plants and 34 ± 7%of animals are likely to lose ≥50% of their present climatic range by the 2080s. With mitigation, however, losses are reduced by 60% if emissions peak in 2016 or 40% if emissions peak in 2030. Thus, our analyses indicate that without mitigation, large range contractions can be expected even amongst common and widespread species, amounting to a substantial global reduction in biodiversity and ecosystem services by the end of this century. Prompt and stringent mitigation, on the other hand, could substantially reduce range losses and buy up to four decades for climate change adaptation.
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Climate Science Documents
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Quantifying the Extent of North American Mammal Extinction Relative to the Pre-Anthropogenic Baseline
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Earth has experienced five major extinction events in the past 450 million years. Many scientists suggest we are now witnessing a sixth, driven by human impacts. However, it has been difficult to quantify the real extent of the current extinction episode, either for a given taxonomic group at the continental scale or for the worldwide biota, largely because comparisons of pre-anthropogenic and anthropogenic biodiversity baselines have been unavailable. Here, we compute those baselines for mammals of temperate North America, using a sampling-standardized rich fossil record to reconstruct species-area relationships for a series of time slices ranging from 30 million to 500 years ago. We show that shortly after humans first arrived in North America, mammalian diversity dropped to become at least 15%–42% too low compared to the ‘‘normal’’ diversity baseline that had existed for millions of years. While the Holocene reduction in North American mammal diversity has long been recognized qualitatively, our results provide a quantitative measure that clarifies how significant the diversity reduction actually was. If mass extinctions are defined as loss of at least 75% of species on a global scale, our data suggest that North American mammals had already progressed one-fifth to more than halfway (depending on biogeographic province) towards that benchmark, even before industrialized society began to affect them. Data currently are not available to make similar quantitative estimates for other continents, but qualitative declines in Holocene mammal diversity are also widely recognized in South America, Eurasia, and Australia. Extending our methodology to mammals in these areas, as well as to other taxa where possible, would provide a reasonable way to assess the magnitude of global extinction, the biodiversity impact of extinctions of currently threatened species, and the efficacy of conservation efforts into the future.
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Quantifying the negative feedback of vegetation to greenhouse warming: A modeling approach
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Several climate models indicate that in a 2 × CO2 environment, temperature and precipitation would increase and runoff would increase faster than precipitation. These models, however, did not allow the vegetation to increase its leaf density as a response to the physiological effects of increased CO2 and consequent changes in climate. Other assessments included these interactions but did not account for the vegetation down‐regulation to reduce plant’s photosynthetic activity and as such resulted in a weak vegetation negative response. When we combine these interactions in climate simulations with 2 × CO2, the associated increase in precipitation contributes primarily to increase evapotranspiration rather than surface runoff, consistent with observations, and results in an additional cooling effect not fully accounted for in previous simulations with elevated CO2. By accelerating the water cycle, this feedback slows but does not alleviate the projected warming, reducing the land surface warming by 0.6°C. Compared to previous studies, these results imply that long term negative feedback from CO2‐induced increases in vegetation density could reduce temperature following a stabilization of CO2 concentration.
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Quantitative global analysis of the role of climate and people in explaining late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions
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The late Quaternary period saw the rapid extinction of the majority of the world’s terrestrial megafauna. The cause of these dramatic losses, especially the relative importance of climatic change and the impacts of newly arrived people, remains highly controversial, with geographically restricted analyses generating conflicting conclusions. By analyzing the distribution and timing of all megafaunal extinctions in relation to climatic variables and human arrival on five landmasses, we demonstrate that the ob- served pattern of extinctions is best explained by models that combine both human arrival and climatic variables. Our conclusions are robust to uncertainties in climate data and in the dates of megafaunal extinctions and human arrival on different land- masses, and strongly suggest that these extinctions were driven by both anthropogenic and climatic factors.
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