from Section 1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2011
Abstract
Interactions between climate and biodiversity are complex and present a serious challenge to scientists who aim to reconstruct the ways in which climate change has shaped life in the past and will contine to do so in the future. This chapter introduces the contributions made to climate change research by the fields of ecology and systematics and outlines how their approaches and methods have, often through necessity, become increasingly integrated. It explores: (1) how climate change has influenced evolutionary and ecological processes such as adaptation, migration, speciation and extinction; (2) how these processes determine the diversity and biogeographic distribution of species and their populations; and (3) how ecological and systematic studies can be applied to conservation and policy planning in our rapidly changing world.
Introduction to climate change, ecology and systematics
Not only does the marvellous structure of each organised being involve the whole past history of the earth, but such apparently unimportant facts as the presence of certain types of plants or animals in one island rather than in another, are now shown to be dependent on the long series of past geological changes, on those marvellous astronomical revolutions which cause a periodic variation of terrestrial climates, on the apparently fortuitous action of storms and currents in the conveyance of germs, and on the endlessly varied actions and reactions of organised beings on each other.
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