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Related paper containing detailed description: Moesinger et al. (2020) Vegetation optical depth (VOD) describes the attenuation of radiation by plants. VOD a function of frequency as well as vegetation water content, and by extension biomass. VOD has many possible applications in studies of the biosphere, such as biomass monitoring, drought monitoring, phenology analyzes or fire risk management. We merged VOD observations from various spaceborne sensors (SSM/I, TMI, AMSR-E, AMSR2, WindSat) to create global long-term vod time series. Prior to aggregation the data has been rescaled to AMSR-E, removing systematic differences between them. There is a product for C-band (~6.9 GHz, 2002 - 2018), X-band (10.7 GHz, 1997 - 2018) and Ku-band (~19 GHz, 1987 - 2017). The data is global sampled on a regular 0.25 degrees grid. Each product is available as daily global netcdf4 files. Currently there is an issue with opening the file using ESA SNAP. As an alternative Panoply can be used to quickly visualize the data. An update of VODCA, addressing this issue and potentially including an extension of the dataset, is foreseen to be published on Zenodo early 2020. Please contact us if you have any questions, problems or suggestions for improvement! Files: "VODCA_C-band_2002-2018_v01.0.0.zip" (unzipped size: ~140 GB): VODCA C-band files, sorted into yearly folders "VODCA_X-band_1997-2018_v01.0.0.zip" (unzipped size: ~180 GB): VODCA X-band files, sorted into yearly folders "VODCA_Ku-band_1987-2017_v01.0.0.zip" (unzipped size: ~270 GB) : VODCA Ku-band files, sorted into yearly folders "vodca_v01-0_K-band_2007-06-01.nc" sample file of the Ku-band product "ESA-CCI-SOILMOISTURE-LAND_AND_RAINFOREST_MASK-fv04.2.nc" Contains a global land mask, VODCA only has data for land locations. Source: https://github.com/TUW-GEO/smecv-grid Variables of data in VODCA files: "VOD": Unitless, Vegetation Optical Depth of the respective band "sensor_flag": Bit-flag indicating which sensors contributed to each observation. Values: 1 = AMSR-E 2 = AMSR2 3 = SSM/I F8 4 = SSM/I F11 5 = SSM/I F13 6 = TMI 7 = WindSat "processing_flag": Bit-flag indicating irregularities during processing affecting the quality of the observations Values: 0 = Everything is fine 10 = AMSR-2 7.3 GHz band is used instead of 6.9 GHz 11 = Sensor is scaled to matched TMI instead of AMSR-E 12 = Sensor scaled without temporally overlapping observations "time"/"lon"/"lat": Dimensions of the data.

Dynamics of societal material stocks such as buildings and infrastructures and their spatial patterns drive surging resource use and emissions. Building up and maintaining stocks requires large amounts of resources; currently stock-building materials amount to almost 60% of all materials used by humanity. Buildings, infrastructures and machinery shape social practices of production and consumption, thereby creating path dependencies for future resource use. They constitute the physical basis of the spatial organization of most socio-economic activities, for example as mobility networks, urbanization and settlement patterns and various other infrastructures. This dataset features a detailed map of material stocks for the whole of Germany on a 10m grid based on high resolution Earth Observation data (Sentinel-1 + Sentinel-2), crowd-sourced geodata (OSM) and material intensity factors. Temporal extent The map is representative for ca. 2018. Data format Per federal state, the data come in tiles of 30x30km (see shapefile). The projection is EPSG:3035. The images are compressed GeoTiff files (*.tif). There is a mosaic in GDAL Virtual format (*.vrt), which can readily be opened in most Geographic Information Systems. The dataset features area and mass for different street types area and mass for different rail types area and mass for other infrastructure area, volume and mass for different building types Masses are reported as total values, and per material category. Units area in m² height in m volume in m³ mass in t for infrastructure and buildings Further information For further information, please see the publication or contact Helmut Haberl (helmut.haberl@boku.ac.at). A web-visualization of this dataset is available here. Visit our website to learn more about our project MAT_STOCKS - Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the Transformation to a Sustainable Society. Publication Haberl, H., Wiedenhofer, D., Schug, F., Frantz, D., Virág, D., Plutzar, C., Gruhler, K., Lederer, J., Schiller, G. , Fishman, T., Lanau, M., Gattringer, A., Kemper, T., Liu, G., Tanikawa, H., van der Linden, S., Hostert, P. (accepted): High-resolution maps of material stocks in buildings and infrastructures in Austria and Germany. Environmental Science & Technology Funding This research was primarly funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (MAT_STOCKS, grant agreement No 741950). ML and GL acknowledge funding by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (CityWeight, 6111-00555B), ML thanks the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC; project Multi-Scale, Circular Economic Potential of Non-Residential Building Scale, EP/S029273/1), JL acknowledges funding by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), project ESR17-067, TF acknowledges the Israel Science Foundation grant no. 2706/19.

AbstractThe future distribution of river fishes will be jointly affected by climate and land use changes forcing species to move in space. However, little is known whether fish species will be able to keep pace with predicted climate and land use‐driven habitat shifts, in particular in fragmented river networks. In this study, we coupled species distribution models (stepwise boosted regression trees) of 17 fish species with species‐specific models of their dispersal (fish dispersal model FIDIMO) in the European River Elbe catchment. We quantified (i) the extent and direction (up‐ vs. downstream) of predicted habitat shifts under coupled “moderate” and “severe” climate and land use change scenarios for 2050, and (ii) the dispersal abilities of fishes to track predicted habitat shifts while explicitly considering movement barriers (e.g., weirs, dams). Our results revealed median net losses of suitable habitats of 24 and 94 river kilometers per species for the moderate and severe future scenarios, respectively. Predicted habitat gains and losses and the direction of habitat shifts were highly variable among species. Habitat gains were negatively related to fish body size, i.e., suitable habitats were projected to expand for smaller‐bodied fishes and to contract for larger‐bodied fishes. Moreover, habitats of lowland fish species were predicted to shift downstream, whereas those of headwater species showed upstream shifts. The dispersal model indicated that suitable habitats are likely to shift faster than species might disperse. In particular, smaller‐bodied fish (<200 mm) seem most vulnerable and least able to track future environmental change as their habitat shifted most and they are typically weaker dispersers. Furthermore, fishes and particularly larger‐bodied species might substantially be restricted by movement barriers to respond to predicted climate and land use changes, while smaller‐bodied species are rather restricted by their specific dispersal ability.

Abstract Background Around the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, an obvious global cooling occurred, which resulted in dramatic changes in terrestrial ecosystems and the evolutionary trends of numerous organisms. However, how plant lineages responded to the cooling has remained unknown until now. Between ca. 70–60 Ma Mesocyparis McIver & Basinger (Cupressaceae), an extinct conifer genus, was distributed from eastern Asia to western North America and provides an excellent opportunity to solve this riddle. Results Here we report a new species, Mesocyparis sinica from the early Paleocene of Jiayin, Heilongjiang, northeastern China. By integrating lines of evidence from phylogeny and comparative morphology of Mesocyparis, we found that during ca.70–60 Ma, the size of seed cone of Mesocyparis more than doubled, probably driven by the cooling during the K-Pg transition, which might be an effective adaptation for seed dispersal by animals. More importantly, we discovered that the northern limit of this genus, as well as those of two other arboreal taxa Metasequoia Miki ex Hu et Cheng (gymnosperm) and Nordenskioldia Heer (angiosperm), migrated ca.4–5° southward in paleolatitude during this time interval. Conclusions Our results suggest that the cooling during the K-Pg transition may have been responsible for the increase in size of the seed cone of Mesocyparis and have driven the migration of plants southwards.

Seagrass meadows are among the most valuable habitats in the world as they are used by a wide range of marine organisms and provide important ecosystem services. With increasing human populations and coastal development, seagrasses are under increased stress and coverage is declining worldwide. This is the first experiment to test the effects of two known seagrass stressors, increased temperature and reduced light availability, on the composition of seagrass blade surface microbial communities, which is a relatively understudied community. Analysis of 16S rRNA amplicon (iTag) sequence data revealed that both of these stressors significantly altered microbial community structure, including both taxonomy and abundance, on the blade surfaces of the tropical seagrass Thalassia testudinum. The highest temperature and lowest light treatments showed higher abundances of phyla not commonly reported as indigenous members of seagrass phyllosphere communities, including members of the bacterial phyla Ca. PAUC34f, Ca. Modulibacteria, and Chlamyidae. Despite these compositional difference among treatments, no significant differences in overall microbial diversity or richness were found. These results suggested seagrass phyllosphere microbial communities have the capacity to change significantly and relatively quickly in response to changing environmental conditions due to anthropogenic activity. Further studies are needed to determine if these direct environmental effects on the microbial community or indirect effects that feedback through the seagrass host.

AbstractWarmer temperatures are accelerating the phenology of organisms around the world. Temperature sensitivity of phenology might be greater in colder, higher latitude sites than in warmer regions, in part because small changes in temperature constitute greater relative changes in thermal balance at colder sites. To test this hypothesis, we examined up to 20 years of phenology data for 47 tundra plant species at 18 high‐latitude sites along a climatic gradient. Across all species, the timing of leaf emergence and flowering was more sensitive to a given increase in summer temperature at colder than warmer high‐latitude locations. A similar pattern was seen over time for the flowering phenology of a widespread species, Cassiope tetragona. These are among the first results highlighting differential phenological responses of plants across a climatic gradient and suggest the possibility of convergence in flowering times and therefore an increase in gene flow across latitudes as the climate warms.

AbstractBackgroundA fundamental and enduring problem in evolutionary biology is to understand how populations differentiate in the wild, yet little is known about what role organismal development plays in this process. Organismal development integrates environmental inputs with the action of gene regulatory networks to generate the phenotype. Core developmental gene networks have been highly conserved for millions of years across all animals, and therefore, organismal development may bias variation available for selection to work on. Biased variation may facilitate repeatable phenotypic responses when exposed to similar environmental inputs and ecological changes. To gain a more complete understanding of population differentiation in the wild, we integrated evolutionary developmental biology with population genetics, morphology, paleoecology and ecology. This integration was made possible by studying how populations of the ant speciesMonomorium emersonirespond to climatic and ecological changes across five ‘Sky Islands’ in Arizona, which are mountain ranges separated by vast ‘seas’ of desert. Sky Islands represent a replicated natural experiment allowing us to determine how repeatable is the response ofM. emersonipopulations to climate and ecological changes at the phenotypic, developmental, and gene network levels.ResultsWe show that a core developmental gene network and its phenotype has kept pace with ecological and climate change on each Sky Island over the last ∼90,000 years before present (BP). This response has produced two types of evolutionary change within an ant species: one type is unpredictable and contingent on the pattern of isolation of Sky lsland populations by climate warming, resulting in slight changes in gene expression, organ growth, and morphology. The other type is predictable and deterministic, resulting in the repeated evolution of a novel wingless queen phenotype and its underlying gene network in response to habitat changes induced by climate warming.ConclusionOur findings reveal dynamics of developmental gene network evolution in wild populations. This holds important implications: (1) for understanding how phenotypic novelty is generated in the wild; (2) for providing a possible bridge between micro- and macroevolution; and (3) for understanding how development mediates the response of organisms to past, and potentially, future climate change.