Relationship between increase rate of human plague in China and global climate index as revealed by cross-spectral and cross-wavelet analyses

Plague has caused the death of hundreds of millions of people throughout the human history.Today this disease is again re-emerging and hence is again becoming an increasing threat to human health in several parts of the world.However,impacts of global climate variation(e.g.El Nino and Southern Oscillation[ENSO])and global warming on plagues are largely unknown.Using cross-spectral analysis and cross-wavelet analysis,we have analyzed the relationship between increase rate of human plague in China during 1871–2003 and the following climate factors(as measured by the Southern Oscillation Index[SOI],Sea Surface Temperature of east Pacific equator[SST]and air Temperature of the Northern Hemisphere[NHT]).We found in the frequency domain that increase rate of human plague was closely associated with SOI and SST.Cross-spectral analysis reveals that significant coherencies between increase rate of human plague and ENSO were found over short periods(2–3 years),medium periods(6–7 years)and long periods(11–12 years,30–40 years).Cross-wavelet analysis reveals that increase rate of human plague oscillates in phase with SOI,but in anti-phase with SST over periods of 2–4 years and approximately 8 years(6–10 years).These results indicate that ENSO-driven climate variation may be important for occurrences of human plague in China.However,there is a need for a further analysis of the underlying mechanism between human plague in China and ENSO.

Ecometrics:The traits that bind the past and present together

We outline here an approach for understanding the biology of climate change,one that integrates data at multiple spatial and temporal scales.Taxon-free trait analysis,or“ecometrics,”is based on the idea that the distribution in a community of ecomorphological traits such as tooth structure,limb proportions,body mass,leaf shape,incubation temperature,claw shape,any aspect of anatomy or physiology can be measured across some subset of the organisms in a community.Regardless of temporal or spatial scale,traits are the means by which organisms interact with their environment,biotic and abiotic.Ecometrics measures these interactions by focusing on traits which are easily measurable,whose structure is closely related to their function,and whose function interacts directly with local environment.Ecometric trait distributions are thus a comparatively universal metric for exploring systems dynamics at all scales.The main challenge now is to move beyond investigating how future climate change will affect the distribution of organisms and how it will impact ecosystem services and to shift the perspective to ask how biotic systems interact with changing climate in general,and how climate change affects the interactions within and between the components of the whole biotic-physical system.We believe that it is possible to provide believable,quantitative answers to these questions.Because of this we have initiated an IUBS program iCCB(integrative Climate Change Biology).

The Biological Consequences of Global Change

ChangeClimate is currently changing.These changes will havea variety of effects on biological systems,at various lev-els spanning from the physiological to the ecosystem level.Zoologists,among others,need to address the questionof how climate changes(and variation)affect biologicalprocess at these different levels of organization,and theyneed to do so in an integrated manner.With this view inmind,Integrative Zoology is pleased to present this spe-cial issue on“the biological consequences of globalchange.”This special issue is linked to a larger initiativeof the International Society of Zoological Sciences,namely,its flagship research program with the same title:the“Bio-logical Consequences of Global Change”(BCGC).Thisspecial issue is the first in a series of such issues:duringthe period 2010 to 2012 Integrative Zoology plan to pub-lish one such special issue per year.

Contrasting phenology responses to climate warming across the northern extra-tropics

Climate warming has substantially advanced the timing of spring leaf-out of woody species at middle and high latitudes,albeit with large differences.Insights in the spatial variation of this climate warming response may therefore help to constrain future trends in leaf-out and its impact on energy,water and carbon balances at global scales.In this study,we used in situ phenology observations of 38 species from 2067 study sites,distributed across the northern hemisphere in China,Europe and the United States,to investigate the latitudinal patterns of spring leaf-out and its sensitivity(S T,advance of leaf-out dates per degree of warming)and correlation(R_(T),partial correlation coefficient)to temperature during the period 1980-2016.Across all species and sites,we found that S_(T) decreased significantly by 0.15±0.02 d℃^(-1)°N^(-1),and R_(T) increased by 0.02±0.001°N^(-1)(both at P<0.001).The latitudinal patterns in R_(T) and S_(T) were explained by the differences in requirements of chilling and thermal forcing that evolved to maximize tree fitness under local climate,particularly climate predictability and summed precipitation during the pre-leaf-out season.Our results thus showed complicated spatial differences in leaf-out responses to ongoing climate warming and indicated that spatial differences in the interactions among environmental cues need to be embedded into large-scale phenology models to improve the simulation accuracy.

Evaluating the effectiveness of control measures in multiple regions during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020

The number of COVID-19 confirmed cases rapidly grew since the SARS-CoV-2 virus was identified in late 2019.Due to the high transmissibility of this virus,more countries are experiencing the repeated waves of the COVID-19 pandemic.However,with limited manufacturing and distribution of vaccines,control measures might still be the most critical measures to contain outbreaks worldwide.Therefore,evaluating the effectiveness of various control measures is necessary to inform policymakers and improve future preparedness.In addition,there is an ongoing need to enhance our understanding of the epidemiological parameters and the transmission patterns for a better response to the COVID-19 pandemic.This review focuses on how various models were applied to guide the COVID-19 response by estimating key epidemiologic parameters and evaluating the effectiveness of control measures.We also discuss the insights obtained from the prediction of COVID-19 trajectories under different control measures scenarios.

Reflections from the president of the International Society of Zoological Sciences:the zoology of zoonotic infectious diseases

The past 2 years we now have behind us have demonstrated the importance of understanding the dynamics of zoonotic diseases in the wild and how the disease agents spill over to the human population.At the end of 2021,Integrative Zoology published 2 special subsections on this topic,one of which focuses on plague—a zoonotic infectious disease which through history has ravaged the world.Plague,caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis,continues to cause deaths among people.I am quite confident that we will not get rid of wildlife plague,but human plague epidemics might be history in the not too distant future(Baril et al.2019;Vallès et al.2020).