Determining climate change impacts on ecosystems: the role of palaeontology

Abstract

Climate change is projected to change the ecosystems on land and in the sea at rates that are unprecedented for millions of years. The most commonly used approach to derive projections of how ecosystems will look in the future are experiments on living organisms. By their nature, experiments are unlike the real world and cannot capture the ability of organisms to migrate, select and evolve. They are often limited to a select few species and drivers of environmental change and hence cannot represent the complexity of interactions in 'real' ecosystems. The fossil record is an archive of responses to climate change at a global ecosystem scale. If, and only if, fossil assemblage variation is combined with independent information of environmental changes, sensitives of species or higher taxa to a specific magnitude of change of an environmental driver can be determined and used to inform future vulnerabilities of this species to the same driver. While records are often fragmented, there are time intervals which, when thoroughly analysed with quantitative data, can provide valuable insights into the future of biodiversity on this planet. This review provides an overview of projected impacts on marine ecosystems including: (1) the range of neontological methods, observations and their challenges; and (2) the complementary information that palaeontologists can contribution to this global challenge. I advocate that, in collaborations with other disciplines, we should aim for a strong visibility of our field and the knowledge it can provide for policy relevant assessments of the future.

Analysis of Spatial Heterogeneity and Influencing Factors of Ecological Environment Quality in China’s North-South Transitional Zone

“…The time phase of remote sensing data does not reach a very high degree of closeness, and there is a certain error in the results of the analysis of RSEI. Moreover, climate change has an important impact on the quality of ecosystems and the ecological environment and should be considered in the future [ 69 , 70 ]. Limited by the number of data acquisitions, this study only studies the 2017 Qinling-Daba Mountains’ RSEI and its influencing factors and has not carried out multi-dimensional studies on multiple years to reveal its temporal and spatial distribution characteristics.…”

Evaluation of the Ecological Quality of the Taishan Region Based on Landsat Series of Satellite Images

“…The factors that change the ecological quality can be roughly divided into natural factors and human factors. Some studies have shown that climate has become a driving factor for changes in the ecological environment [23]. Compared with the SPEI-based drought characteristics reported by Yan et al [24] from 1958 to 2015, it has been found that the 2013 Mount Tai region was the worst drought in 13 years.…”

Causality from palaeontological time series

“…; Finnegan et al . ; Kidwell ; Schmidt ). With the looming threat of large‐scale disruption of global ecosystems, there is a need for palaeontologists to be bifocal: we need to zoom in to uncover the historical particulars of individual events, but also zoom out to search for underlying causal structures that may hold general lessons across multiple events.…”