The global climate change footprint in a Mexican desert ecosystem: The increasing frequency of extreme climatic events

Abstract

While the accuracy of scenarios of Global Climate Change has been improved, the lack of climatic data from several regions of the world means that some predictions remain misleading. The local climate studies are critical for the calibration of global climate scenarios. Our objective was to evaluate the climate trends within the Cuatro Ciénegas Basin (CCB). Specifically, we aimed to: 1) identify potential trends in the behavior of temperature and precipitation; 2) assess the nature and direction of changes in the frequency of extreme climate events (ECE); and 3) detect changes in inter-annual precipitation variability. To achieve these aims, we analyzed a 70-year database of climatic variables from the CCB weather station. Data were subjected to trend analys es using two different software packages; ECE frequency was evaluated by Chi -square analysis and precipitation data was analyzed by the standardized pluviometric drought index Minimum temperature (Tmin) increased in almost 2 °C every month, while mean temperature (Tmean) increased 2 °C but only in the summer months. Lower Tmin frequency increased two times or higher in the winter months, while the frequency of upper event extremes increased at least three times during the summer months, as did the extreme events of maximum temperature (Tmax). Winters have 2021, Instituto Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua Open Access bajo la licencia CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Ecosystem science: a new approach in the analysis of functional processes in natural and human transformed terrestrial ecosystems

“…These results suggest that the loss of bacterial species strongly affects the mechanisms of soil nutrient availability. The effect of the management could be worse than that of global climate change in this site, since the frequency of extreme climatic events had increased over the last decade (Montiel-González et al 2021). In conclusion, soil bacterial composition is the key factor that controls the resilience of soil nutrient dynamics in this desert ecosystem.…”

Physiological ecology of Mexican CAM plants: history, progress, and opportunities

“…In addition, habitat disturbance and urbanization, with its expanding and destructive human footprint, continues to affect through and impact all ecosystems (Schmidt et al 2020;Shen et al 2020). Climatic extremes like droughts, frosts, hurricaneassociated floods, and warming are now quite common (Altwegg et al 2017;Montiel-González et al 2021). These are World's 'new normal' and plant ecophysiology provides and will provide some of the most critical evidence and fundamental understanding about how the diversity of plant adaptations (including CAM species) will enable plants to operate the conditions of the Anthropocene (Lambers & Oliveira 2019).…”