January 24 – Going Further “Towards Understanding Marine Biological Impacts of Climate Change”: developing from the NCEAS workshop experience.

This talk will briefly cover our original meta-analysis at NCEAS, and the inspiration we got from trying to develop simple expectations for climate change effects on geographical range shifts and changes in seasonal timing of ecological events. Rates of spatial shifts in climate, mostly based on isotherms, have proved useful first order predictors of likely rates of distribution shifts.  We have extended this approach to forecast diversity losses under warming. A major challenge is to test or validate the predicted effects of climate change on ecosystems from spatial shifts in climate. We have recently been exploring the use of community-level measures of the relative dominance of warm and cold water species for this purpose, and gaining insights into the responsiveness of communities to warming in systems across the globe.

Speaker: Mike Burrows

About Mike: I’m a Professor at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban in western Scotland, and have been there since the early 1990s. My research interests range from behavioural ecology, through trophic interactions in communities, spatial patterns in community structure in relation to waves and phytoplankton, to long-term change in populations and communities – mostly on intertidal and shallow water rock and sand.