Climate change is toppling our Earth's ecosystems out of balance in multiple ways, with often dramatic consequences. Many plants and animals are already impacted. But surprisingly, it is only poorly understood which are the specific threats, and how the actual consequences will look like.
A study involving CREAF's Josep Peñuelas has identified the optimal temperatures of terrestrial plant ecosystems throughout the world and indicates the size of their margin for adaptation to warming. Outside that margin, ecosystem growth slows sharply.
We interviewed Sara Marañón, a postdoctoral researcher at CREAF with a Marie Curie grant.
Are the insects which begin their adult life in the coldest months the largest? An accepted paradigm within ecology, Bergmann's rule, says that organisms in the coldest regions of the Earth tend to be larger. Two months ago, Sergio Osorio presented his doctoral thesis at CREAF in which he analyzed this principle to test if seasonality is also related with body size.
The production of essential crops such as wheat, maize, rice, and soybean will be substantially reduced. Effective measures for climate change adaptation will be necessary, as well as improvements in crop genetics in order to reduce the impacts of climate change.
