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Habitat Refugia: A Practical Strategy to Conserve Biodiversity Under Climate Change
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As climatic zones shift under climate change, many regions and habitats will slowly become climatically unsuit- able for some of the species that currently inhabit them. The availability of climate refugia - habitats and regions which are buffered from extremes in temperature and fluctuations in water availability, could allow some species to adapt to climate change in-situ, and facilitate dispersal and range shifts for other species.
This information sheet explains the concepts behind habitat refugia with specific reference to how refugia can be used to protect and conserve terrestrial biodiversity faced with rapid climate change.
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Refugia: identifying and understanding safe havens for biodiversity under climate change
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Identifying and protecting refugia is a priority for conservation under pro- jected anthropogenic climate change, because of their demonstrated ability to facilitate the survival of biota under adverse conditions. Refugia are habitats that components of biodiversity retreat to, persist in and can potentially expand from under changing environmental conditions. However, the study and discussion of refugia has often been ad hoc and descriptive in nature. We therefore: (1) provide a habitat-based concept of refugia, and (2) evaluate methods for the identification of refugia.
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Identifying refugia from climate change
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This article highlights how the loose definition of the term ‘refugia’ has led to discrepancies in methods used to assess the vulnerability of species to the current trend of rising global temperatures. The term ‘refugia’ is commonly used without distinguishing between macrorefugia and microrefugia, ex situ refugia and in situ refugia, glacial and interglacial refugia or refugia based on habitat stability and refugia based on climatic stability. It is not always clear which definition is being used, and this makes it difficult to assess the appropriateness of the methods employed. For example, it is crucial to develop accurate fine-scale climate grids when identifying microrefugia, but coarse-scale macroclimate might be adequate for determining macrorefugia. Similarly, identifying in situ refugia might be more appropriate for species with poor dispersal ability but this may overestimate the extinction risk for good dispersers. More care needs to be taken to properly define the context when referring to refugia from climate change so that the validity of methods and the conservation significance of refugia can be assessed.
Keywords
Bioclimatic envelope models, climatic stability, conservation biogeography, cryptic refugia, ecological niche models, extinction risk, interglacial refugia, macrorefugia, microclimate, microrefugia.
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The New Era Of Climate Risk Disclosure
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In February of this year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission made clear in no uncertain terms that corporations have a duty to disclose risks faced through poten- tial climate change. Yet many boards remain unaware of what constitutes a “material” climate risk, or just how broad the scope and potential impact truly are.
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The impact of climate change on mental health
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Climate change will shortly be assuming centre stage when Copenhagen hosts the United Nations Climate Change Conference in early December 2009. In Copenhagen, delegates will discuss the international response to climate change (i.e. the ongoing increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature) and the meeting is widely viewed as the most important of its kind ever held (http://en.cop15.dk/). International agreement will be sought on a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. At the time of writing it is not known whether agreement will be reached on the main issues of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and financing the impacts of climate change, and it appears that the impact of climate change on mental health is unlikely to be on the agenda. We discuss here how climate change could have consequences for global mental health and consider the implications for future research and policy.
Key words : Climate, mental disorder, mental health, global warming.
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Importance of matrix habitats in maintaining biological diversity
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Matrix management matters because formal reserve systems will never cover more than a small fraction of the globe.
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The impact of climate change on the structure of Pleistocene food webs across the mammoth steppe
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Species interactions form food webs, impacting community structure and, potentially, ecological dynamics. It is likely that global climatic perturbations that occur over long periods of time have a significant influence on species interaction patterns. Here, we integrate stable isotope analysis and network theory to reconstruct patterns of trophic interactions for six independent mammalian communities that inhabited mammoth steppe environments spanning western Europe to eastern Alaska (Beringia) during the Late Pleis- tocene. We use a Bayesian mixing model to quantify the contribution of prey to the diets of local predators, and assess how the structure of trophic inter- actions changed across space and the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), a global climatic event that severely impacted mammoth steppe communities. We find that large felids had diets that were more constrained than those of co-occurring predators, and largely influenced by an increase in Rangifer abun- dance after the LGM. Moreover, the structural organization of Beringian and European communities strongly differed: compared with Europe, species inter- actions in Beringian communities before—and possibly after—the LGM were highly modular. We suggest that this difference in modularity may have been driven by the geographical insularity of Beringian communities.
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Why a collapse of global civilization will be avoided: a comment on Ehrlich & Ehrlich
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1st paragraph: Ehrlich FRS & Ehrlich [1] claim that over-population, over-consumption and the future climate mean that ‘preventing a global collapse of civilization is perhaps the foremost challenge confronting humanity’. What is missing from the well- referenced perspective of the potential downsides for the future of humanity is any balancing assessment of the progress being made on these three chal- lenges (and the many others they cite by way of detail) that suggests that the problems are being dealt with in a way that will not require a major disruption to the human condition or society. Earlier dire predictions have been made in the same mode by Malthus FRS [2] on food security, Jevons FRS [3] on coal exhaustion, King FRS & Murray [4] on peak oil, and by many others. They have all been overcome by the exercise of human ingenuity just as the doom was being prophesied with the deployment of steam engines to greatly improve agricultural efficiency, and the discoveries of oil and of fracking oil and gas, respectively, for the three examples given. It is incumbent on those who would continue to predict gloom to learn from history and make a comprehen- sive review of human progress before coming to their conclusions. The problems as perceived today by Ehrlich FRS and Ehrlich will be similarly seen off by work in progress by scientists and engineers. My comment is intended to summarize and reference the potential upsides being produced by today’s human ingenuity, and I leave the reader to weigh the balance for the future, taking into account the lessons of recent history.
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Future collapse: how optimistic should we be?
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1st paragraph: Prof. Kelly FRS is optimistic about the chances of avoiding a collapse, but sadly we find his arguments entirely unpersuasive. For example, have Malthus (or we) really been wrong about food security? Roughly 850 million people are seriously undernourished (lacking sufficient calories) today, and perhaps 2 billion are malnourished (lacking one or more essential nutrients) [1]. When Malthus lived, there were only about 1 billion people on the planet. We agree that there are many things that could be done to feed today’s population of 7.1 billion, or even perhaps over 9 billion in 2050. Many of them (e.g. limiting waste) have been discussed for 50 years with little sign of progress. We do not think any serious analyst doubts that, if it were equitably distributed, today’s food production could nourish everyone adequately. Equally, we know of no serious analyst who believes such distribution is likely in the future. The concern is that climate disruption combined with other problems with the agricultural system will make it impossible to feed an ever larger future population, even if equal distribution were achieved. That concern is reinforced by the recent observation that, even before the likely heavy impacts of climate disruption on agriculture appear, production is failing to keep pace with projected needs [2].
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Life history predicts risk of species decline in a stochastic world
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Understanding what traits determine the extinction risk of species has been a long-standing challenge. Natural populations increasingly experience reductions in habitat and population size concurrent with increasing novel environmental variation owing to anthropogenic disturbance and climate change. Recent studies show that a species risk of decline towards extinction is often non-random across species with differ- ent life histories. We propose that species with life histories in which all stage-specific vital rates are more evenly important to population growth rate may be less likely to decline towards extinction under these pressures. To test our prediction, we modelled declines in population growth rates under simulated stochas- tic disturbance to the vital rates of 105 species taken from the literature. Populations with more equally important vital rates, determined using elasticity analysis, declined more slowly across a gradient of increas- ing simulated environmental variation. Furthermore, higher evenness of elasticity was significantly correlated with a reduced chance of listing as Threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. The relative importance of life-history traits of diverse species can help us infer how natural assemblages will be affected by novel anthropogenic and climatic disturbances.
Keywords: International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List; extinction; life history; stage-based; elasticity; stochasticity
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