Etiqueta: climate change

News

Plants are exposed to frost more frequently as a result of climate change

14 de February 2018Albert Naya i Díaz

Plants' annual growing season has lengthened, exposing them to frost more often at a time when they are particularly sensitive. That can be detrimental to their activity and lead to substantial crop yield losses.

News

Climate change is causing plants to flower earlier and changing the rhythm of nature

1 de February 2018Anna Ramon Revilla

CREAF and the companies Altran and Starlab have led the design of RitmeNatura.cat, a citizen observatory that encourages members of the public to ‘adopt’ a plant, record the changes it undergoes and provide data that can be used to study the effects of climate change.

News

Thirsty holm oaks lose 21% more carbon through their roots

19 de January 2018Albert Naya i Díaz

Once rehydrated, holm oaks have a large capacity for recovery thanks to their high adaptation to the Mediterranean climate. The release of organic compounds into the soil represents a considerable loss of carbon for the holm oak and also modifies the microbial community, which may lead to additional effects on the tree.

News

How the forests of the Iberian Peninsula have changed over 25 years?

18 de December 2017Albert Naya i Díaz

The increase in drought episodes and the lack of water in the soil have favored Mediterranean species. At the same time, conifers are losing ground because they are less adapted to droughts. These trends correspond to the period of 1987 to 2012 and have been confirmed through satellite remote sensing images.

News

For the time being, forests are helping to slow CO2 accumulation and climate change

4 de December 2017Albert Naya i Díaz

A study led by CREAF shows that decreases in pollutant deposition and the increase in atmospheric CO2 have stimulated photosynthesis and carbon sequestration in forests. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how carbon circulates in the atmosphere, in living organisms, oceans, and soils in order to anticipate the effects of climate change.

News

Fossil fuel emissions hit record high after unexpected growth: Global Carbon Budget 2017

16 de November 2017CREAF

The Global Carbon Budget 2017 has analyzed carbon emission sources and sinks worldwide. This year the researcher Benjamin Stocker from CREAF has collaborated in the report contributing and preparing data about how the change in the use we give to the territory has affected CO₂ emissions.

News

Rising temperatures threaten global agricultural production

16 de October 2017Albert Naya i Díaz

The production of essential crops such as wheat, maize, rice, and soybean will be substantially reduced. Effective measures for climate change adaptation will be necessary, as well as  improvements in crop genetics in order to reduce the impacts of climate change. 

Knowledge

Tree herders

14 de October 2017Francisco Lloret

Some giant trees, such as cedars and redwoods, are an example of great longevity and their populations depend much more on tendencies than on specific traumatic episodes. Climate change and human pressures can put their survival at risk.

News

The greening of the earth is reaching its limit

19 de September 2017Albert Naya i Díaz

A new study led by Josep Peñuelas and published in Nature Ecology and Evolution reveals that CO2 abundance in the atmosphere no longer has a powerful fertilizing effect on vegetation. The greening that has been observed in recent years is slowing and this will cause CO2 levels in the atmosphere to rise, thus increasing temperatures and leading to increasingly severe changes in climate.

News

Do drought-affected trees die of thirst or hunger?

16 de August 2017Albert Naya i Díaz

A new study has concluded that, universally, trees that have died from drought are unable to transport water to their leaves. The findings also highlight trees that have drained their carbon reserves since they are not able to carry out photosynthesis. The results of the study will permit the creation of more precise models for predicting the effects of climatic changes on vegetation.

Knowledge

Forest wildfires: learning from the beast

11 de August 2017Francisco Lloret

We are in the middle of the wildfire season, and the ecologist Francisco Lloret explains what we can learn about fires and how we can adapt to them to avoid catastrophic large wildfires.

News

Climate change is already threatening the Mediterranean ecosystems of Catalonia

19 de July 2017Albert Naya i Díaz

An extensive review of studies and databases reveals that drought and an increase in temperature are already causing species substitutions, greater aridity, higher forest fire risk, lower soil fertility, and lower water availability, among other negative impacts.

News

The BeWater publishes a guide about participatory management of river basins

28 de June 2017Verónica Couto Antelo

The manual, in which the CREAF researchers Anabel Sánchez and Annelies Broekman have participated, summarizes the stages of the BeWater project and the lessons learned in the creation of adaptation plans between scientists and local society.

News

Diana and Eduard Pascual Plan co-published a book about adapting the Mediterranean basin to climate change

13 de June 2017Verónica Couto Antelo

The book, available in English, focuses on the nature reserve shared between southern Spain and northern Morocco. In particular, it values the impacts of climate change on the availability of water from an ecological, socio-economic and political point of view.

News

Achieving the COP21 agreements is currently far-fetched

9 de June 2017Albert Naya i Díaz

The COP21 set the maximum temperature increase for 2100 at 1.5° C. The only scenario which would allow achievement of this goal would require vastly reducing human CO2 emissions, significantly increasing the prominence of renewable energies, and the use of some type of artificial carbon sequestration technology.

Knowledge

That viscous film which envelops the Earth

6 de June 2017Francisco Lloret

Life on Earth barely extends over its surface. But organisms have been able to transform its climate for millions of years. Now, humans seem to reach it again in a record time.

Knowledge

The forest fate: winning time

6 de March 2017Francisco Lloret

What is the future that the Mediterranean forests expect? Climate change is already strongly felt and its impacts reach everywhere. Francisco Lloret tells the current situation and how we will have to prepare ourselves and forests to the coming changes .

Knowledge

A dangerous metabolism: future remedies against CO2 increase?

8 de February 2017Jaume Terradas

Geoengineering is a hope to slow down and reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Technological innovations must help us to find solutions to this global problem.

News

Birds that live in changing environments have larger brains

16 de January 2017Albert Naya i Díaz

A large brain increases the capacity to adjust behavior to new circumstances through learning, improving resource-gathering in a changing environment. Greater understanding of this capacity can improve predictions of what species of birds and other animals will be most vulnerable to global change.

News

Last days to send your abstracts for the BeWater’s last conference

12 de December 2016CREAF

December 31 is the last day to send the abstracts for the BeWater project conference, which will take place in Slovenia on 7 and 8 March 2017.

Knowledge

Verum ipsum factum

9 de December 2016Jaume Terradas

We need to understand how things work, to know how to assemble and how to disassemble them. But we have reached a point of so much specialization and mechanization that too much often we can not understand how everything works, and even more, if we will be able to fix what we have broken.

Knowledge

Riding resilience

6 de December 2016Francisco Lloret

The use of the term 'resilience' has been extended. But success entails risks. When dealing with complex concepts encapsulated in a word, the risk translates into confusion. It is therefore worth entertaining the passage and meditate for a while.

News

The loss of soil carbon can accelerate climate change

1 de December 2016Albert Naya i Díaz

The journal Nature has today published a study which had the participation of CSIC scientists at CREAF, Marc Estiarte and Josep Peñuelas, which demonstrates the relationship between the release of carbon from soils and the acceleration of climate change.

News

Empowerment of women will improve our ability to cope with global change

29 de November 2016Albert Naya i Díaz

Ending perceptions of women and other disadvantaged groups simply as victims and instead empowering them as decision-makers in natural resource management are basic steps to deal with ecological crises more effectively. A new collection of studies addresses global environmental change from a feminist and interdisciplinary perspective.

Knowledge

In urbibus mundi

8 de November 2016Jaume Terradas

In this new post, Jaume Terradas thinks about what nature has meant for human since the dawn of our species, and how the accumulation of people in cities leads us to be away from nature.

News

70% of Mediterranean butterfly species are in decline

26 de September 2016Verónica Couto Antelo

CREAF researchers signal climate change and changes in land use as the principal causes. The most impacted are specialized species living in very specific habitats and those producing a number of generations in a single year. 

News

Using 3D animations to understand plant anatomy

22 de July 2016Verónica Couto Antelo

How does water move inside a tree? CREAF researchers are helping to demystify such topics using 3D images wich reconstruct the internal structure of tree branches and trunks, and further, deepening our knowledge on the transport of water and nutrients .

Knowledge

Peñuelas, awarded with Margalef Prize

21 de July 2016Jaume Terradas

In the prizes to the trajectory of a scientist, people say , the hardest is to begin, because after the first award, the winner can be pretty sure that others will come. Maybe, but there are different categories of prizes. Josep Peñuelas is starting to get the big ones, those that he deserves by his contributions to ecology, his dedication and his ability to empathize in order to establish fruitful relationships with scientists all around the world.

News

Flowers and butterflies lose their synchronicity due to climate change

18 de July 2016Verónica Couto Antelo

A study finds that high temperatures and low rainfall cause a timing mismatch between the flowering period of plants and the time of flight of butterflies. The moments of maximum florescence and butterfly abundance are separated by a mean time of 70 days, increasing in years with marked drought. 

Knowledge

The State of the World’s Plants, a gift from the Kew Gardens

9 de June 2016Jaume Terradas

In mid-May, NASA announced the discovery of 1,284 new planets, thanks to the Kepler space telescope. Quite a lot... The globalization seems to make the Earth small and small, but the known Universe grows fast.

News

Humans are as much to blame for increased wildfire risk as climate change

29 de April 2016Albert Naya i Díaz

A new study on wildfires in California, published in the journal PLOS ONE, and with the participation of  Enric Batllori, researcher from CREAF and the Catalonia Forest Technology Centre (CTFC), reveals that human activities influence the frequency and location of wildfires just as much as climate. The researchers evaluated both the 'anthropogenic factor' and climate change. This is the first time that a study of this sort has been carried out in a territory of such size (California is about 13 times the size of Catalonia).

News

The treeline in Tibet increases slower than temperatures

27 de April 2016Albert Naya i Díaz

The forest treeline shifts upward slower than temperature increase, and it can be hindered by densification of shrubs. A number of factors influence upward forest expansion, including the particular plant species growing near trees, climate change, human activity, and terrain morphology. The Tibetan Plateau, practically devoid of human pressures, offers a pristine area for study 

News

#FenoDato seeks citizens to help monitor how climate change is altering nature’s rhythm

19 de January 2016Anna Ramon Revilla

Climate experts, botanists, geographers and ecologists from CREAF and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) will train citizens to monitor seasonal changes which can be observed in nature. This way citizens will be able to help the scientists study the effects of climate change on animals and plants. Flower emergence, the dropping of leaves, or the arrival of certain birds will be some of the changes to be studied. Once trained, citizens will be able to contribute to European and Spanish phenology observation networks.

News

The tallest trees in tropical forests die from dehydration after extreme droughts

25 de November 2015Anna Ramon Revilla

According to a study co-led by CREAF staff published this week in the journal Nature, droughts caused by climate change could result in the death of the tallest tress in tropical forests. For the first time, the scientists have shown that after prolonged water deficit tall trees suffer embolisms in their circulatory systems and die of dehydration. 

News

Birds and butterflies are key indicators for the measurement of biodiversity loss

11 de November 2015Anna Ramon Revilla

According to a study in which CREAF participated, the populations of birds or butterflies living in open habitats have been negatively affected by the loss of field and scrubland habitat. Conversely, species which live in forests have been favored. These variations were related with changes in the Catalonian (and Mediterranean) landscape over the last few decades. 

News

With Earth observation, ECOPOTENTIAL will improve the future of ecosystem services

30 de October 2015Anna Ramon Revilla

This research initiative financed by the European Horizon 2020 program has 47 partners, including CREAF, and a budget of 15 million euros.

News

Climate change could change the gender ratio of acorn weevils

6 de October 2015Anna Ramon Revilla

According to a study in which CREAF participated, the delay of late-summer rains could change the equilibrium between males and females in these Mediterranean weevils, favoring the females. The authors have shown that male weevils are more sensitive to prolonged drought. 

News

The response of leaf unfolding phenology to climate warming has significantly reduced in Central Europe

23 de September 2015CREAF

Leaf unfolding occurred on average about 4 days earlier every one degree increase in spring temperature between 1980 and 1994, whereas this value dropped to -2.3 days C-1 between 1999 and 2013, a decrease of over 40%. According to this study recently published in the jorunal Nature with the participaction of Josep Peñuelas, researcher from CSIC at CREAF, warmer winters and photoperiod are forcing plants to control their phenology calendars.

News

Increased ozone levels reduce flowers’ sex appeal

17 de September 2015Anna Ramon Revilla

New research finds that as climate change increases ozone levels, pollinators will have a harder timing finding plants that feed them. That’s going to be a problem for the bees that pollinate a third of the world’s food supply. Flowers and other plants rely on microscopic scent molecules to attract the bees and other pollinators that feed on them. Climate change is going to disrupt that process, mostly because of ground-level ozone, which is projected to increase over the coming decades. The study, published in the journal New Phytologist, found that flowers’ fragile scent molecules break down more quickly as they are exposed to greater levels of ozone. >> Read the full article from Takepart.com here

News

ECUAFLUX project studies the impact of climate change in Ecuador’s Andean mountains

22 de July 2015CREAF

The lakes of El Cajas National Park, located at 4,000 metres high in Ecuador’s Azuay province, are the scene of the fieldwork carried out within the research project ECUAFLUX, an initiative to analyse the carbon cycle in the Andean basins of Ecuador and foresee the impact of climate change on natural ecosystems. Carles Gracia, CREAF researcher and UB lecturer, is one of the experts who participates in the project.

News

MENFRI project and EXPO Milan 2015

15 de July 2015CREAF

MENFRI project  has been featured in an interactive presentation –“How EU Research & Innovation works for a better world supporting communication activities”, prepared for EXPO 2015, showing successful EU-funded research projects.

News

Increased daytime temperatures is causing earlier leaf emergence

29 de April 2015Marina Torres Gibert

A study led by a CREAF-CSIC researcher has outlined a new methodology for describing changes in the life cycle of plants caused by planetary warmingwith higher precision. Daytime, rather than nocturnal temperatures determine phenological changes. The increase in temperatures, leading to an earlier spring, alters the global functioning of ecosystems.

News

Droughts alter microbial diversity of the land and increase CO2 emissions

14 de April 2015CREAF

Researchers from the UAB, CREAF and the National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN-CSIC) have analysed how the deterioration of woods caused by droughts associated to global warming are affecting the microbial composition of the soil and modifying carbon cycles.

News

The youngest ecosystems are those most sensitive to climate change

24 de March 2015Marina Torres Gibert

CREAF participated in a study which proposes that in order to understand the full impact of climate change, it is not enough to study just protected natural areas, which are mature and able to handle change; instead, it is important to focus on the study of those ecosystems which have been altered and are still recovering.

News

Studying the effects of climate change from space enters the Big Data era

2 de October 2014Anna Ramon Revilla

A new method developed by CREAF and the Autonomous University of Barcelona allows the automatic processing of thousands of satellite images taken by Landsat without manual intervention or the need of atmospheric data. 

Media

The economic benefits of sustainable forestry in the Mediterranean region

22 de July 2014CREAF

Mediterranean forests provide local communities with a diverse range of products such as wood, fodder for livestock and plants and game, all of which contribute to food security and help to alleviate poverty in rural regions. However, these forests will be one of the most affected ecosystems in the near future as temperatures increase and rains decrease. In order to avoid the Mediterranean region turning into a desert, expert forest management is required.

News

What will the future smell like?

22 de July 2014Anna Ramon Revilla

Researchers from CREAF, CSIC, and the Institute of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences of Estonia have found that flowers are becoming more fragrant as the global mean temperature rises. In addition, intense heat provokes changes in the composition of floral aromas, transforming the odors of natural areas. This could lead to pollinizers mistaking the identity of flowers, especially specialist species whose flower visits are guided by their own innate olfactory preferences.

News

MENFRI brings together experts to cooperate towards a profitable and sustainable use of forests in the Mediterranean

6 de June 2014Anna Ramon Revilla

On May 26th 2014, experts from different countries and background (industry, policymaking, science, NGOs, etc) gathered in Morocco in the framework of the project “Mediterranean Network of Forestry Research and Innovation” (MENFRI) to assess the forestry sector organization and development opportunities in Mediterranean countries.

News

BeWater project launched its first stakeholder Workshop

28 de May 2014Anna Ramon Revilla

The BeWater project launched its first series of meetings on 28 May in La Tordera, Catalonia, Spain. CREAF, the local case study leader, together with consortium partners, met key local stakeholders in order to introduce the project, hear local perspectives on the state of the river basin and discuss potential global change impacts.

News

Nutrient-rich forests absorb more carbon

7 de April 2014Anna Ramon Revilla

Thee ability of forests to sequester carbon from the atmosphere depends on nutrients available in the forest soils, shows new research from an international team of researchers,

News

The expansion of the Oaks “chokes” the forests of the Iberian Peninsula

6 de November 2013Anna Ramon Revilla

A study conducted by researchers at the CREAF and the Autonomous University of Barcelona demonstrates that many pine populations of the Iberian Peninsula are in decline. The study foresees a very unfavorable scenario for some pine species with predicted climate change, which would see the pines negatively affected by both the expansion of the holm-oak, as well as an increase in drought and fire.

News

Nightime global warming limites CO2 uptake by boreal flora

5 de September 2013Anna Ramon Revilla

Nightime temperatures on the planet have increased 1.4 times faster than daytime temperatures. This asymmetry alters carbon fluxes and plant growth in the northern hemisphere, according to a study in which the CREAF is participating.

News

Firefighters are the main factor that determines the current patterns of forest fires in Catalonia

21 de June 2013Anna Ramon Revilla

A new model of landscape evolution, developed by a group of Catalan and Canadian researchers, identifies that the ability to extinguish fire is essential in the explanation of the fire patterns in Catalan territory. The model also shows that, if current climate trends continue, the burned area could increase by more than 60% in the next 20 years.

News

LIFE MEDACC: A new project to test innovative adaptation strategies to climate change

23 de May 2013Anna Ramon Revilla

The LIFE MEDACC project (LIFE12 ENV/ES/000536 Demonstration and validation of innovative methodology for regional climate change adaptation in the Mediterranean area) is an excellent opportunity both to make the European Commission aware of Catalonia’s advances in tackling the effects of climate change laid out in the Catalan Strategy for Adapting to Climate Change (ESCACC), and to inform research institutions and technology centres of the knowledge generated.

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