Population responses within a landscape matrix: a macrophysiological approach to understanding climate change impacts |
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Authors: | Steven L Chown Kevin J Gaston Mark van Kleunen Susana Clusella-Trullas |
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Institution: | (1) Centre for Invasion Biology, Department of Botany and Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Private Bag X1, 7602 Matieland, South Africa;(2) Biodiversity and Macroecology Group, Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN, UK;(3) Institute of Plant Sciences and Oeschger Centre, University of Bern, Altenbergrain 21, 3013 Bern, Switzerland |
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Abstract: | Global environmental change (GEC) is a significant concern. However, forecasting the outcomes of this change for species and
ecosystems remains a major challenge. In particular, predicting specific changes in systems where initial conditions, instabilities,
and model errors have large impacts on the outcome is problematic. Indeed, predictive community ecology has been deemed unworthy
of pursuit or an unreachable goal. However, new developments in large-scale biology provide ways of thinking that might substantially
improve forecasts of local and regional impacts of climate change. Most notably, these are the explicit recognition of the
regional and landscape contexts within which populations reside, the matrix approach that can be used to investigate the consequences
of population variation across space and within assemblages, and the development of macrophysiology, which explicitly seeks
to understand the ecological implications of physiological variation across large spatial and temporal scales. Here we explore
how a combination of these approaches might promote further understanding and forecasting of the effects of global climate
change and perhaps other GEC drivers on biodiversity. We focus on the population level, examining the ways in which environmental
variation might be translated through performance and its plasticity to variation in demography. |
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