Ecological Forecasting

. The ultimate goal of the approach is to provide people such as resource managers with information that they can then use to respond, in advance, to those impending changes.

One of the most important environmental factors impacting organisms today is global climate change. Virtually all physiological processes are affected by temperature, and so even small changes in weather and climate can lead to large changes in the growth, reproduction and survival of animals and plants. Scientists are very certain that the emission of greenhouse gasses is leading to climate change, and that these changes are in turn impacting both humans and ecosystems.
One major challenge is to predict where and when impacts will occur so that we can mitigate or at least prepare for them. Ecological forecasting applies our knowledge of how animals and plants interact with their physical environment to ask, how will changes in climate (and other environmental factors) result in changes to the natural environment?

Approaches

One approach to ecological forecasting is called “climate envelope modeling.” It basically relies on statistical correlations between existing species distributions and environmental variables to define a species' tolerance. “Envelopes” of tolerance are then drawn around existing ranges. By predicting future levels of factors such as temperature, rainfall, and salinity, new range boundaries are then predicted. These methods are good for examining large numbers of species, but are likely not a good means of predicting effects at fine scales. A new method for forecasting ecological effects links physiological information about a species to models of animal and plant body temperature. In contrast to “climate envelope” approaches, environmental variables are predicted at the level of the niche and are therefore much more exact. However, the approach is also more time consuming.

References

Clark, J.S. et al. 2001. Ecological forecasts: an emerging imperative. "Science" 293: 657-660.
Gilman, S.E., D.S. Wethey and B. Helmuth 2006. Variation in the sensitivity of organismal body temperature to climate change over local and geographic scales. "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences", 103 (25): 9560-9565.
Helmuth, B., N. Mieszkowska, P. Moore and S.J. Hawkins. 2006. Living on the edge of two changing worlds: forecasting the responses of rocky intertidal ecosystems to climate change. "Annual Review of Ecolology Evolution and Systematics" 37: 373-404.
Kearney, M. 2006. Habitat, environment and niche: what are we modelling? "Oikos" 115: 186-191.
Kearney, M, B.L. Phillips, C.R. Tracy, K.A. Christian, G. Betts, and W.P. Porter, 2008. Modelling species distributions without using species distributions: the cane toad in Australia under current and future climates. "Ecography" 31 (4): 423-434.

Lohse, K.A, D.A Newburn, J.J. Opperman, and A.M. Merenlender. 2008. Forecasting relative impacts of land use on anadromous fish habitat to guide conservation planning. "Ecological Applications" 18 (2): 467-482.
Stockwell, D. and D. Peters 1999. The GARP modelling system: problems and solutions to automated spatial prediction. "Int. J. Geog. Inf. Sci." 13: 143-158.
Wethey, D.S,. and S.A. Woodin. 2008. Ecological hindcasting of biogeographic responses to climate change in the European intertidal zone. "Hydrobiologia" 606:139-151. [http://www.amnh.org/sciencebulletins/bio/s/barnacles.20061030/]

ee also

*Climate Change
*Global Warming

External Links

NASA Ecological Forecasting [http://nasascience.nasa.gov/earth-science/applied-sciences/national-applications/ecological-forecasting ]
NOAA Ecological Forecasting [http://www.cop.noaa.gov/ecoforecasting/welcome.html]
Ecological Forecasting at The University of South Carolina [http://www.biol.sc.edu/~helmuthlab/index.html]