Michael Matiu

Università degli Studi di Trento | UNITN · Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering

Spring mowing in May and June is one of the main causes of mortality of roe deer fawns in agricultural regions. Knowing the exact birth distribution of fawns is important to guide farmers in their pre‐mowing precautions to avoid fawn deaths. Wildlife volunteers searching fields prior to mowing can act as citizen scientists by producing data sets of...

Snowfall and snow accumulation play a crucial role in shaping ecosystems and human activities in the Alpine region. This resource is under threat as a consequence of the visible effects of global warming, and, therefore, it appears urgent to understand how snowfall trends have changed in time and space. In this context, we recovered data from over...

Mountain seasonal snow cover is undergoing major changes due to global climate change. Assessments of future snow cover usually rely on physically based models, and often include post-processed meteorology. Alternatively, we here propose a direct statistical adjustment of snow cover fraction from regional climate models by using long-term remote-se...

Mountain seasonal snow cover is undergoing major changes due to global climate change. Assessments of future snow cover usually rely on physical based models, and often include post-processed meteorology. Alternatively, here we propose a direct statistical adjustment of snow cover fraction from regional climate models by using long-term remote sens...

A high-resolution gridded dataset of daily mean temperature and precipitation series spanning the period 1980–2018 was built for Trentino-South Tyrol, a mountainous region in north-eastern Italy, starting from an archive of observation series from more than 200 meteorological stations and covering the regional domain and surrounding countries. The...

Several historical time series of the Italian Alps are available and include snow depth (HSimed), snow precipitation (HN) and snow cover duration (HSday). The number of measurement stations used in the present work for the statistical analyses vary according to the availability and data quality. The used reference climatic period is the 1961-1990 t...

The European Alps stretch over a range of climate zones which affect the spatial distribution of snow. Previous analyses of station observations of snow were confined to regional analyses. Here, we present an Alpine-wide analysis of snow depth from six Alpine countries – Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and Switzerland – including altoget...

A high-resolution gridded dataset of daily mean temperature and precipitation series spanning the period 1980ndash;2018 was built for Trentino ndash; South Tyrol, a mountainous region in north-eastern Italy, starting from an archive of observation series from more than 200 meteorological stations, covering the regional domain and surrounding countr...

The European Alps stretch over a range of climate zones, which affect the spatial distribution of snow. Previous analyses of station observations of snow were confined to regional analyses. Here, we present an Alpine wide analysis of snow depth from six Alpine countries: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and Switzerland; including altogeth...

Low-cost phenological experiments with cut twigs are increasingly used to study bud development in response to spring warming and photoperiod. However, a broader variety of species needs to be tackled and in particular the influence of insufficient winter chilling deserves more attention. Therefore, we investigated if and how chilling requirements...

Climate change will affect future hygrothermal performance of buildings. This could lead to higher risks regarding energy optimization, thermal comfort and historic building conservation depending on the local climate, building construction and retrofit solutions adopted. This paper explores the risks brought by climate change on a typical resident...

A paper published in Global Change Biology in 2006 revealed that phenological responses in 1971‐2000 matched the warming pattern in Europe, but a lack of chilling and adaptation in farming may have reversed these findings. Therefore, for 1951‐2018 in a corresponding dataset, we determined changes as linear trends and analysed their variation by pla...

Climate models are important tools to assess current and future climate. While they have been extensively used for studying temperature and precipitation, only recently regional climate models (RCMs) arrived at horizontal resolutions that allow studies of snow in complex mountain terrain. Here, we present an evaluation of the snow variables in the...

Snow cover dynamics impact a whole range of systems in mountain regions, from society to economy to ecology; and they also affect downstream regions. Monitoring and analyzing snow cover dynamics has been facilitated with remote sensing products. Here, we present two high-resolution daily snow cover data sets for the entire European Alps covering th...

Climate change will affect future hygrothermal performance of buildings. This could lead to higher risks regarding energy optimization, thermal comfort and historic building conservation depending on the local climate, building construction and retrofit solutions adopted. This paper explores the risks brought by climate change on a typical resident...

Tree seedling resistance to and recovery from abiotic stressors such as drought and warming are crucial for forest regeneration and persistence. Selection of more resilient provenances and their use in forest management programs might alleviate pressures of climate change on forest ecosystems. Scots pine forests in particular have suffered frequent...

Alpine ecosystems are particularly sensitive to climate change, and therefore it is of significant interest to understand the relationships between phenology and its seasonal drivers in mountain areas. However, no alpine-wide assessment on the relationship between land surface phenology (LSP) patterns and its climatic drivers including snow exists....

Short-rotation agroforestry systems can potentially maintain agricultural production and promote conservation of soil and biodiversity, especially if grown organically. Hereby, species-specific stand growth determines woody biomass yield and influences management decisions like planting density and harvest requirements. Studies of longer-term growt...

In forests, the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations (Ca) has been related to enhanced tree growth and intrinsic water-use efficiency (iWUE). However, in drought-prone areas such as the Mediterranean Basin it is not yet clear to what extent this ‘fertilizing’ effect may compensate for drought-induced growth reduction. We investigated tree gro...

Forests cover approximately 30% of the world’s land area and are responsible for 75% of terrestrial gross primary production. Disturbances, such as fire, storm or insect outbreaks alter the dynamics and functioning of forest ecosystems with consequences, in terms of species distribution and/or gross primary production, not fully understood. Large f...

Inter-annual crop yield variation is driven in large parts by climate variability, wherein the climate components of temperature and precipitation often play the biggest role. Nonlinear effects of temperature on yield as well as interactions among the climate variables have to be considered. Links between climate and crop yield variability have bee...

Significance of highest order term in mixed model of global yields after adding random noise on FAO data. Shown on the y-axis is the percentage of significance levels of the highest order interaction term (listed at the top of each panel) for each crop depending on noise level added to yields (on the x-axis). Generally speaking, as one adds more no...

Climate variability effects on crop yield variability for the USA, determined by national level yield aggregated from state level data. The same as Fig 6, but here effects were estimated from national level yield data as opposed to state level yield data in Fig 6. (TIFF)

Time series length of FAO yield data: After (before) quality checks. Maximum number 54 corresponds to full time series length (1961–2014). Quality criteria: if countries reported the identical values in 2 consecutive years, then all years prior or after were excluded; manual visual inspection (see methods for further details). (DOCX)

Significance of highest order term in linear models of country yields after adding random noise on FAO data. Shown is the percentage of significance levels of the highest order terms (interaction, quadratic, or linear, as listed at the top of each panel) for each crop and country depending on noise level added to yields. (TIFF)

Country crop time series that needed higher dimension for yield detrending. See methods for details. (DOCX)

Long-term phenological data have been crucial at documenting the effects of climate change in organisms. However, in most animal taxa, time series length seldom exceeds 35 years. Therefore, we have limited evidence on animal responses to climate prior to the recent warm period. To fill in this gap, we present time series of mean first arrival dates...

Background: Presence of small (tertiary) Gleason 5 pattern is linked to a higher risk of biochemical recurrence in prostate cancer. It is unclear, however, how to integrate small Gleason 5 elements into clinically relevant Gleason grade groups. Objective: To analyze the prognostic impact of Gleason 5 patterns in prostate cancer and to develop a...

Indoor pollen concentrations are an underestimated human health issue. In this study, we measured hourly indoor birch pollen concentrations on eight days in April 2015 with portable pollen traps in five rooms of a university building at Freising, Germany. These data were compared to the respective outdoor values right in front of the rooms and to b...

With recent climate changes, Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) forests have been affected by die-off events. Assisted migration of adapted provenances mitigates drought impacts and promotes forest regeneration. Although suitable provenances are difficult to identify by traditional ecophysiological techniques, which are time consuming and invasive, p...

Figure S1. Estimated common time trend coefficients for linear mixed effects models of various distributional measures of mean temperature versus time of all stations, depending on the time base used to compute the measures (columns) and the time frame for trend estimation (rows). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals. Trends in solid lines are...

Figure S2. Quantile Regression example of slope‐quantile plots.

Figure S3. Estimated common time trend coefficients for linear mixed effects models of various distributional measures of minimum and maximum temperature versus time of all stations, depending on the time base used to compute the measures (columns) and the time frame for trend estimation (rows). Error bars show 95% confidence intervals. Trends in s...

While the rise in global mean temperature over the past several decades is now widely acknowledged, the issue as to whether and to what extent temperature variability is changing continues to undergo debate. Here, variability refers to the spread of the temperature distribution. Much attention has been given to the effects that changes in mean temp...

Within the last 20 years the Impact Factor of Global Change Biology (GCB) has grown rapidly to become 6.91. According to the ISI Journal Citation Report of 2012, the journal is currently ranked as 1/40 in Biodiversity Conservation, 5/210 in Environmental Sciences and 9/136 in Ecology. Up to December 2013 GCB published 3,143 items which have been ci...