Summary of Recent Literature

• A piece by Richard Kerr in the Nov. 25, 2011 issue of Science highlights the need for a better connection between the science of climate change (how will climate affect things at a local scale) and the practitioners who are trying to prepare for the future. His report on a meeting subtitled "Climate Research in Service to Society” highlights the difficulties the scientists and others face in coming up with “actionable science” at the local and regional scale. 

• A piece by Hulme in the Nov. 11, 2011 issue of Science argues that funding for adaptation to climate change should be based on vulnerability to hazards, institutional capacity, and social justice and should not be dependent on whether the weather event is attributable to human-caused climate change.

• Two articles in the May 2011 issue of Global Environmental Change highlight the need to include social and other factors in valuing ecosystem services, and understanding the local context can minimize the limits put on ecosystem services and how they are valued.

Some recent articles on climate change predictions at regional and local scales discuss the limitations scientists face when going from global to smaller scales: 

• A news piece in the October 14 issue of Science talks about the need for better small scale predictions and that the uncertainties in global models can be compounded when going to smaller scales.  

• The January 2012 issue of Environmental Health Perspectives has an article on downscaling climate models and how various regional climate models are being used to prepare for climate change.

• Recent articles highlight some factors that could influence the ability of species to migrate and survive climate change.

• Results of experiments in an intertidal ecosystem suggest that anthropogenic climate change can alter interspecific interactions and produce unexpected changes in species distributions, community structure, and diversity(Harley, Science Nov. 25, 2011). 

• In the Nov. 4, 2011 issue of Science articles by Burrows et. al. and Sandel et. al. discuss the speed with which climate has changed locally and across geographic space over the past 50 years and how climate conditions influence biodiversity patterns of endemic species. 

• Two articles in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences look at factors that affect extinction in communities including species interactions (dispersal ability, competition) and genetic diversity. 

• Urban, Tewksbury, and Sheldon (2012) analyze species’ ability to disperse to new habitats and the factors that affect this in the face of climate change. They warn that we are probably underestimating the loss of biodiversity that will happen with climate change. 

• An article by Alsos et. al (2012) in the same journal measured genetic diversity in northern plants and found that most species could lose genetic diversity in response to climate change, especially species that are not adapted to long distance dispersal.

• A paper by Schloss, et. al. studied conservation sites on the Columbian Plateau taking into account abiotic factors compared with sites prioritized to protect current biodiversity. This comparison highlights places that are important for protecting both today’s biodiversity and the diversity of abiotic factors that will likely determine biodiversity patterns in the future.  
• Davies, et. al. studied the effects of a species’ dominance and biomass on ecosystem functioning. Their results suggest that the biomass contributed by a species to an assemblage can be used to approximately predict the proportional decline in an ecosystem process when that species is lost. This was compared with scenarios in which more resilient species offset the loss of biomass associated with the extinction of competitors. These scenarios could be used to predict the minimum and maximum species required to sustain threshold values of ecosystem processes in the future.

• Puttker, et. al. studied the effects of vegetation cover and habitat fragmentation on a species’ ability to survive and migrate. The results show the importance of the total amount of remaining native vegetation for species persistence in fragmented landscapes, and specifically the role of variable immigration rates in providing the underlying mechanism that drives both patch-area effects and species extinction thresholds. 

Other articles in PLoSOne discuss:

• Ocean pH (Hofmann, et. al. 2011)- by measuring upper ocean pH in a range of ecosystems they found spatial and temporal variation in pH. These and similar comparative time series can help guide management efforts to identify areas of marine habitat that can serve as refugia to acidification as well as areas that are particularly vulnerable to future ocean change.

• Grassland conservation (Leisher, et. al. 2011) - this paper discusses the Umgano grassland conservation and poverty reduction project in South Africa.

• Forest bird conservation (Buchanan, Donald, & Butchart, 2011)- they found that some forested areas are of high importance for bird conservation, and areas with high impact scores, rapid deforestation, low protection and high carbon storage values may represent significant opportunities for both biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation, for example through Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiatives.