Climate change is a complicated phenomenon with a variety of both abrupt and gradual effects that scientists are working hard to uncover. Emerging findings on how various ecosystems are responding to a changing climate, stemming from long-term research conducted through the National Science Foundation's 40-year-old Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program, have now been published in a series of articles in the journal BioScience.
, novel disturbances, altered primary production, enhanced cycling of organic and inorganic matter and changes in the populations and communities.
Climate change is producing suites of different and often unique impacts in various places. The findings presented in the BioScience LTER series explore: forest and freshwaters, drylands, coastal, and ocean. "Many coastal ecosystems are defined by structure-forming foundation species, which play a disproportionately important role in determining the ecological attributes of the system and their socioeconomic benefits," Reed said.plays an outsized role in the waters just offshore from Santa Barbara, creating submarine forests that are among the most productive ecosystems in the world.
Meanwhile, the MCR LTER, located in French Polynesia, represents one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the word, thanks to its foundation species—reef-building corals. Climate change here primarily affects water temperature, which increasingly is resulting in"bleaching" of coral, which starve to death when heat stress causes them lose their symbiotic algae. More powerful storms are also destroying the habitat many organisms call home.
"While strong storms have been a major disturbance to coral throughout their geologic history, episodes of mass coral bleaching from marine heat waves are a recent phenomenon that are increasing in severity and frequency as climate change warms the ocean," said Russ Schmitt, a professor of ecology in UCSB's Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology and lead principal investigator of the MCR LTER site in UCSB's Marine Science Institute.
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