I am a (relatively junior) member of an NCEAS/NSF funded international working group that is assessing how climate change is affecting ocean ecosystems. Today, we published our third major paper (in Nature; Burrows et al. 2014), that predicts how ocean warming will affect global patterns of Biodiversity. Read a nice non-technical summary here and a nice summary by the editor:
To survive in a changing climate, a species may need to move in order to stay in an area with a constant average temperature. Such mobility would depend on an ability to keep pace with a moving climate — and on the absence of physical barriers to migration. These authors use the velocity of climate change to construct a global map of how ecological climate niches have shifted in recent decades and go on to predict changes in species distribution to the end of this century. The map indicates areas that will act as climate sources and sinks, and geographical barriers likely to impede species migration. The data show that geographical connections and physical barriers — mostly coasts — have profound effects on the expected ability of organisms to track their preferred climate. This work underlines the importance of migration corridors linking warmer and cooler areas as a means of maintaining biodiversity.
Our first major paper came out in Science in 2012 (Burrows et al. 2012) in which we described the “velocity” of warming of the planet at relatively fine grains.
Our second paper “Global imprint of climate change on marine life” – and really the primary output of our working group – was published last year in Nature Climate Change. Read my summary here at Skeptical Science and less technical summaries here and here.
We synthesized all available studies of the consistency of marine ecological observations with expectations under climate change. This yielded ametadatabase of 1,735 marine biological responses for which either regional or global climate change was considered as a driver. Included were instances of marine taxa responding as expected, in a manner inconsistent with expectations, and taxa demonstrating no response. From this database, 81–83% of all observations for distribution, phenology, community composition, abundance, demography and calcification across taxa and ocean basins were consistent with the expected impacts of climate change. Of the species responding to climate change, rates of distribution shifts were, on average, consistent with those required to track ocean surface temperature changes. Conversely, we did not find a relationship between regional shifts in spring phenology and the seasonality of temperature. Rates of observed shifts in species’ distributions and phenology are comparable to, or greater, than those for terrestrial systems.
Working group leader Mike Burrows and I (with Chris Harley) also summarized the output of our team and other literature in a new book chapter (Bruno et al. 2014) which I serialized here.
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