New insight into how climate change will affect organisms.Byline: ANI Washington, November 5 (ANI): In a new research, paleoecologists are offering a new insight into how climate change will affect organisms. The research, by Robert Booth, assistant professor of earth and environmental science at Lehigh University Lehigh University, at Bethlehem, Pa.; coeducational; chartered and opened 1866 by Asa Packer. It has undergraduate colleges of arts and science, business and economics, and engineering and applied science, as well as several graduate programs. , examines some of the potential problems with current prediction methods and calls for the use of a range of approaches when predicting the impact of climate change on organisms. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Booth and his colleagues, one of the biggest challenges facing ecologists today is trying to predict how climate change will impact the distribution of organisms in the future. Combining the environmental conditions that allow a particular species to exist with the output from climate models is a commonly used approach to determining where these conditions will exist in the future. However, according to the authors, there some potential problems with the correlational approach that ecologists have traditionally used. "This traditional prediction approach on its own is insufficient," said Booth. "It needs to be integrated with mechanistic mech·a·nis·tic adj. 1. Mechanically determined. 2. Of or relating to the philosophy of mechanism, especially one that tends to explain phenomena only by reference to physical or biological causes. and dynamic ecological modeling Ecological modeling The use of computer simulations or mathematical equations to address questions that cannot be answered solely by experiments or observations. and systematic observations of past and present patterns and dynamics," he added. The researchers use examples from recent paleoecological studies to highlight how climate variability of the past has affected the distributions of tree species, and even how events that occurred many centuries ago still shape present-day distributions patterns. For example, the authors note that some populations of a Western US tree species owe their existence to brief periods of favorable fa·vor·a·ble adj. 1. Advantageous; helpful: favorable winds. 2. Encouraging; propitious: a favorable diagnosis. 3. climatic conditions allowing colonization colonization, extension of political and economic control over an area by a state whose nationals have occupied the area and usually possess organizational or technological superiority over the native population. in the past, such as a particularly wet interval during the 14th century. "The climate system varies at all ecologically relevant time scales," said Booth. "We see differences year to year, decade to decade, century to century and millennia to millennia. When trying to understand how species and populations will respond to changing climate, it's not just changes in the mean climate state that need to be considered, but also changes in variability," he added. (ANI) Copyright 2009 Asian News International The Asian News International (ANI) agency provides multimedia news to China and 50 bureaus in India. It covers virtually all of South Asia since its foundation and presently claims, on its official website, to be the leading South Asia-wide news agency. (ANI) - All Rights Reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion