• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: North Atlantic; North Atlantic oscillation
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.491.3592; http://folk.uio.no/atlemy/pdf/art33.pdf

Climate influences a variety of ecological processes. These effects operate through local weather parameters such as temperature, wind, rain, snow, and ocean currents, as well as interactions among these. In the temperate zone, local variations in weather are often coupled over large geographic areas through the transient behavior of atmospheric planetary-scale waves. These variations drive temporally and spatially averaged exchanges of heat, momentum, and water vapor that ultimately determine growth, recruitment, and migration patterns. Recently, there have been several studies of the impact of large-scale climatic forcing on ecological systems. We review how two of the best-known climate phenomena—the North Atlantic Oscillation and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation—affect ecological patterns and processes in both marine and terrestrial systems. Ecological processes are influenced byprevailing climatic conditions (1). Earlystudies typically focused on local weath-er parameters such as temperature, precipita-tion, and snow depth. By so doing, an impor-tant dimension is overlooked: the holistic na-ture of the climate system (2). Recently, therefore, increasing attention has been given to large-scale patterns of climate variability with marked ecological impacts on interan-nual and longer time scales. Of particular interest are the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) (3) and the El Niño–Southern Oscil-lation (ENSO) (4, 5). These patterns account for major variations in weather and climate around the world and have been shown to affect terrestrial vegetation (6, 7), herbivores and carnivores (8, 9), and marine biology and fish stocks (4, 10, 11) through both direct and indirect pathways. Increasing awareness among and inter-actions between biologists and climate sci-entists are rapidly advancing our insights into the critical issue of the response of ecosystems to climate variability and cli-mate change. Moreover, mutual interest in climate processes is serving as an impetus for new interdisciplinary research.