Ecologia

Due to climate change, every year we record higher temperatures and precipitation is becoming scarce. This change in climate paradigm, added to a cluster of disturbances such as forest fires and pests, tests the resilience of forests around the world and especially those in Mediterranean climate zones that have suffered an increase in the conditions of aridity The ability of species to adapt to these conditions will define the forests of the future. But are Mediterranean forests resilient enough?

CREAF-based CSIC researcher Josep Peñuelas has contributed to an article published in Nature which proposes three key indicators for gauging how well a terrestrial ecosystem is functioning and assessing its state of health or wellbeing.

The recent study 'A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change' published in Nature Communications shows that the measures taken are fragmented, local and not transformative. CREAF calls for more integrated and coordinated measures capable of reducing the risk that climate change poses to people.

A recent study led by CIBIO, the University of the Azores, CSIC and CREAF shows that the navigations of the Vikings could have taken them to the Azores about 700 years before the arrival of the Portuguese. The results, published in the journal PNAS, have been obtained through sediment samples from different lakes and environmental reconstructions.

The combination of chemical elements of each species is called elementome and, like the genome, varies from one species to another according to evolutionary proximity and environmental conditions. Studying the elemental composition of living beings is a tangible, simple and universal method that allows us to relate each species with its position and function in nature.

Science histpry often doesn't visibilize all people equally. Some of them people who have inspired big changes, in this case in ecology and evolution. Many of them are women, and that is why we want to take advantage of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science to make them known.