Scenarios for Global Biodiversity in the 21st Century

Pereira, Henrique M.; Leadley, Paul; Proença, Vânia; Alkemade, Rob; Scharlemann, Jörn P. W.; Fernández-Manjarrés, Juan F.; Araújo, Miguel B.; Balvanera, Patricia; Biggs, Reinette; Cheung, William W. L.; Chini, L. P.; Cooper, H. D.; Gilman, Eric; Guénette, Sylvie; Hurtt, George C.; Huntington, Henry P.; Mace, Georgina M.; Oberdorff, Thierry; Revenga, Carmen; Rodrigues, Patrícia; Scholes, Robert J.; Sumaila, U. Rashid; Walpole, Matt

doi:10.1126/science.1196624

Cited by 1,673 publications

(1,182 citation statements)

References 51 publications

(74 reference statements)

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“…To be a prudent response to the risks of climate change, wait-and-see policies require short delays in all the links in a long causal chain, stretching from the detection of adverse climate impacts to the decision to implement mitigation policies to emissions reductions to changes in atmospheric GHG concentrations to radiative forcing to surface warming and fi nally to climate impacts, including changes in ice cover, sea level, weather patterns, agricultural productivity, habitat loss and species distribution, extinction rates, and the incidence of diseases, among others. Contrary to the logic of "wait and see" there are long delays in every link of the chain (Fiddaman 2002 ;O'Neill and Oppenheimer 2002 ;Stachowicz et al 2002 ;Alley et al 2003 ;Thomas et al 2004 ;Meehl et al 2005 ;Wigley 2005 ;Solomon et al 2009 ;Pereira et al 2010 ) . Similar delays exist for many environmental problems.…”

Section: Time Delaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustaining Sustainability: Creating a Systems Science in a Fragmented Academy and Polarized World

Sterman¹

2012

Sustainability Science

153

174

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From climate change, deforestation, and depletion of fossil fuels to overexploited fi sheries, species extinction, and poisons in our food and water, our society is unsustainable and it is getting worse fast. Many advocate that overcoming these problems requires the development of systems thinking. We have long been told that the unsustainability of our society arises because we treat the world as unlimited and problems unconnected when we live on a fi nite "spaceship Earth" in which "there is no away" and "everything is connected to everything else." The challenge lies in moving from slogans to speci fi c tools and processes that help us understand complexity, design better policies, facilitate individual and organizational learning, and catalyze the technical, economic, social, political, and personal changes we need to create a sustainable society. Here I outline a design for a systems science of sustainability that rises to this challenge. Where the dynamics of complex systems are conditioned by multiple feedbacks, time delays, accumulations, and nonlinearities, our mental models generally ignore these elements of dynamic complexity; where the consequences of our actions spill out across time and space and across disciplinary boundaries, our universities, corporations, and governments are organized in silos that focus on the short term and fragment knowledge. I describe how sustainability research, teaching, and engagement with the policy process can be organized to provide scienti fi cally grounded, reliable knowledge that crosses disciplinary boundaries, that engages multiple stakeholders, that grapples with unavoidable issues of ethics, values, and purpose, and that leads to action.

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Section: Time Delaysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sustaining Sustainability: Creating a Systems Science in a Fragmented Academy and Polarized World

Sterman¹

2012

Sustainability Science

153

174

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“…taxonomic or functional diversity). However, despite the efforts of the last ten years, our capacity to predict the impact of environmental changes on biodiversity remains limited (Pereira et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving plant functional groups for dynamic models of biodiversity: at the crossroads between functional and community ecology

Boulangeat

Philippe

Abdulhak

et al. 2012

Global Change Biology

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The pace of on-going climate change calls for reliable plant biodiversity scenarios. Traditional dynamic vegetation models use plant functional types that are summarized to such an extent that they become meaningless for biodiversity scenarios. Hybrid dynamic vegetation models of intermediate complexity (hybrid-DVMs) have recently been developed to address this issue. These models, at the crossroads between phenomenological and process-based models, are able to involve an intermediate number of well-chosen plant functional groups (PFGs). The challenge is to build meaningful PFGs that are representative of plant biodiversity, and consistent with the parameters and processes of hybrid-DVMs. Here, we propose and test a framework based on few selected traits to define a limited number of PFGs, which are both representative of the diversity (functional and taxonomic) of the flora in the Ecrins National Park, and adapted to hybrid-DVMs. This new classification scheme, together with recent advances in vegetation modeling, constitutes a step forward for mechanistic biodiversity modeling.

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“…Armstrong 2009, Tarrant andArmstrong 2013) as well as to predict niche shifts of species due to future climate change (Erasmus et al 2002, Coetzee et al 2009, García-Domínguez et al 2014. Climate change is expected to cause significant biodiversity losses in the future, including in South Africa (Erasmus et al 2002, Thomas et al 2004, Hannah et al 2005, Pereira et al 2010, McCain and Colwell 2011.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Past, present, and future distribution of Afromontane rodents (Muridae: Otomys) reflect climate-change predicted biome changes

et al. 2016

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Climate change constitutes a potential threat to montane biodiversity, particularly in low-altitude, tropical mountains; however, few data exist for the Afromontane taxa. In South Africa, the temperate grassland and fynbos biomes are mostly associated with the Great Escarpment and the high-lying central plateau. Varying contractions of the grassland and fynbos biomes are predicted under different climate scenarios by 2050. Animal taxa adapted to these biomes should suffer similar range declines and can be used to independently test the vegetation models. We constructed MaxEnt models from 271 unique locality records for three species of montane and submontane vlei rats that are closely associated with grassland angoniensis) due to historically documented changes from a grassland-dominated to thicket-dominated landscape.

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Scenarios for Global Biodiversity in the 21st Century

Cited by 1,673 publications

References 51 publications

Sustaining Sustainability: Creating a Systems Science in a Fragmented Academy and Polarized World

Sustaining Sustainability: Creating a Systems Science in a Fragmented Academy and Polarized World

Improving plant functional groups for dynamic models of biodiversity: at the crossroads between functional and community ecology

Past, present, and future distribution of Afromontane rodents (Muridae: Otomys) reflect climate-change predicted biome changes

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