Join us for an informal talk by Dave on “Climate Change and Global Biodiversity” (see abstract below) on Monday, May 14th at noon in the Program on the Environment Commons (Wallace Hall 012).  

DISCUSSION SUMMARY:
As the world enters the Anthropocene, the planet’s environment is changing rapidly, putting the carbon cycle and critical ecosystem services at risk. Understanding and forecasting how ecosystems and the carbon cycle will change over the coming decades requires understanding the sensitivity of species to environmental change. The extant distribution of species, functional groups and diversity contains valuable information about the performance of different species indifferent environments. However, with high rates of environmental change, information about environmental sensitivity inherent in ranges of many species will disappear, since that information exists only under quasi-equilibrium conditions.