Tuesday, July 14, 2009
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University of Queensland
U21 Online Forum
From here you can interact with fellow delegates from all over the globe, discuss the program, your areas of interest or just get to know one another better.
Feel free to express your views and opinions or just find out what others hope to gain from this years’ event.
Labels
- Biodiversity (4)
- climate change (1)
- coasts and marine (1)
- Energy Futures (1)
- expectations (1)
- Quantity and Waterways (1)
- Response Planning (1)
- Social Implications (1)
- survey (1)
- Water Quality (1)
- world resources (1)
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ReplyDeleteRisks from changed species interactions
ReplyDelete(Posted by Wal but uploaded by Alex Osuch)
With so much uncertainty, as well as differences in response between organisms and phyla, that it is hard to generalise for the effects of climate change on species interactions.
Species interactions will continue to occur, regardless of climate change. Our group believes that changes in species interactions from climate change will occur as different species respond to different abiotic and biotic effects. These may not always be detrimental to individual species however given the level of uncertainty it is unknown what effect this will have at the ecosystem level.
In regards to biodiversity, species redundancy in complex ecosystems is possible without destroying the entire ecosystems provided keystone species are not lost.
Our group believes that the effects of climate change on species interactions may not be as important as the effects of climate change on species habitat, niche availability and access. Resources available for research may better be spent investigating other aspects of species conservation/preservation, unless species interactions lead to direct threats to keystone or important species survival. Such threats could constitute vector borne diseases for both humans, animals and plants; introduction of new predators or extension of existing predator ranges (bark-eating beetle in the US); synchrony of life cycle events (sparrow hatchings and food availability in the UK). [In other words, our group believes that triage should be considered.]
Given the dynamics of ecosystems historically and predicted, capacity to cope with variable outcomes should be built into the conservation program. In this sense, reserve systems should be strategically designed to identify available species niches, source and sink populations as well as other conservation considerations.
We also discussed a “conservation” rather than “preservation (of what we know)” approach, and this as a paradigm shift in our view towards biodiversity.