Climate-change adaptation articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Analysis of population decline shows that frequent disturbances enhance a population’s capacity to resist and recover from downturns and that trade-offs exist when adopting new or alternative land-use strategies.

    • Philip Riris
    • , Fabio Silva
    •  & Xiaolin Ren

  • Article |

    Burial-dating methods using cosmogenic nuclides indicate that the oldest stone tools at Korolevo archaeological site in western Ukraine date to around 1.4 million years ago, providing evidence of early human dispersal into Europe from the east.

    • R. Garba
    • , V. Usyk
    •  & J. D. Jansen

  • Analysis |

    Climate has affected organized armed conflict within countries, and intensifying climate change is estimated to increase future risks of conflict, although other drivers are substantially more influential and the mechanisms of climate–conflict linkages remain uncertain.

    • Katharine J. Mach
    • , Caroline M. Kraan
    •  & Nina von Uexkull

  • Letter |

    Delay in the hibernation emergence date of female Columbian ground squirrels in Canada over 20 years is related to climatic conditions other than increasing temperature, and as years of later emergence are associated with decreased individual fitness, plastic responses to climate change may be associated with declines in population viability.

    • Jeffrey E. Lane
    • , Loeske E. B. Kruuk
    •  & F. Stephen Dobson

  • News & Views |

    Although some genetic mutations have clear effects, others have been considered neutral and inconsequential. Such cryptic mutations can nonetheless facilitate adaptation to new environments. See Letter p.92

    • Jeremy A. Draghi
    •  & Joshua B. Plotkin

  • Letter |

    In vertebrates, sex can be determined either genetically or by temperature, but the evolutionary causes of this variation remain unknown. These authors show how live-bearing lizards at different climatic extremes of their range differ in their sex-determining mechanisms, with temperature-dependent sex determination in the lowlands and genotypic sex determination at higher altitudes. Their results establish an adaptive explanation for intra-specific divergence in sex-determining systems driven by phenotypic plasticity and ecological selection.

    • Ido Pen
    • , Tobias Uller
    •  & Erik Wapstra

  • News & Views |

    A site in Norfolk, UK, provides the earliest and northernmost evidence of human expansion into Eurasia. Environmental indicators suggest that these early Britons could adapt to a range of climatic conditions.

    • Andrew P. Roberts
    •  & Rainer Grün

  • Opinion |

    As tree habitats shift towards the poles in response to climate change, we must study the neglected, trailing edges of forests, warns Csaba Mátyás — they are economically and ecologically important.

    • Csaba Mátyás

  • News & Views |

    When environmental temperatures rise, plants seek help from their core molecular mechanisms to adapt. The chromatin protein H2A.Z, which regulates gene expression, is one such rescue molecule.

    • Roger B. Deal
    •  & Steven Henikoff

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