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Although the range of cultivated species is relatively restricted, domestic plants and animals exhibit considerable resilience to stochastic shocks, and the study of their ecological adaptability and critical physiological and phenologieai requirements is a valuable first step in determining their possible response to climatic change. Methods of assessing agroclimatic suitability and their limitations are discussed, and suggestions are made for simulating the probable impact of shifts in the main climatic parameters on the productivity and spatial distribution of key crops andlivestoek. Some regions and crops are elimatirally more vulnerable than others; some regions (in particular North Amerma) are strategically more critical to the stability of world food supplies, while in others resources for agricultural production are under more severe pressure.As well as attempts to forecast long-term climatic trends and their effects on agriculture, combating climatic variability merits high priority. This is an ever-present source of it~stability in production and could be enhanced in association with changing climate. Its magnitude differs widely among crops and geographical regions, but. its impact from year to year is often greater than that predicted from climatic change even in extreme scenarios. The paper indicates a number of potentially desirable areas for action and suggests that. several of these would be beneficial both as a buffer against short-term effects of variability and as a means of combating climatic change.

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WordNet is an on-line relational database of the English lexicon developed by George Miller and coworkers at Princeton University (Miller, Beckwith, Fellbaum, Gross, & Miller, 1990). The meaning of a particular word in WordNet is expressed principally through its relations to other words and sets of synonyms, with the structure of the database reflecting the current psycholinguistic understanding of the mental lexicon.