Study: Climate Change to Produce New Eco-Systems
Climate change is likely to do a lot more than just increase our air conditioning bills and raise our sea levels. The re-shuffling of plant and animal communities ranks among the most widely accepted (though still little-understood) eventualities of a warming Earth. Now, researchers have mapped out where that re-shuffling is most likely—a necessary first step for anyone looking to preserve precious biodiversity.
“[N]ovel species assemblages are likely to be forming in the North American Great Plains and temperate forests, Amazon, South American grasslands, Australia, boreal Asia and Africa,” climate scientists Alejandro Ordonez, John Williams, and Jens-Christian Svenning write in Nature Climate Change. In those regions (and others), new climates may emerge, and, in some cases, changing profiles of rain and temperature may pull different plants and animals in different directions, ultimately re-shaping how those species interact.
Marilin Gonzalo