New research offers a framework for fast and slow responses to climate change
Life on earth has always responded to change—birds shift the timing of their migration, insect populations grow and shrink, plants evolve to deal with drought. But now, human-caused climate change is moving so quickly that only the fastest ecological responses are keeping up. Ecosystems are lagging behind in a way that makes the future of the natural world very hard to predict.
New research led by an interdisciplinary team, including CIRES researchers Kyra Clark-Wolf and Virginia Iglesias, offers a new framework to anticipate impacts of climate change on ecosystems, integrating both fast and slow processes. The study, published today in Functional Ecology, argues that a stronger focus on timescales could help predict future shifts, with many responses falling under the umbrella term ‘Ecological Acclimation.’
Kyra Clark-Wolf, a postdoctoral associate with the North Central Climate Adaptation Center at CIRES, co-authored the paper. She hopes the new research helps make the jobs of natural resource managers easier, as their work is made more difficult by constant changes in the climate and ecosystems they manage.
"Our new paper helps frame thinking about how different processes - including fast ones, like how plants regulate their exchanges of carbon with the environment, and slow processes, like species dispersal or evolution - contribute to ecosystem changes over time,” Clark-Wolf said. “This understanding can give managers a better sense of what they might see in the short and long term, and how they might intervene when ecosystem changes lag far behind the climate."
