What are the feed back mechanisms between biodiversity and climate, how will they change over the next decades and what are the consequences?

Climate change and biodiversity change are interacting in feed-back loops that are poorly understood and unquantified and modelled. This applies to changing land (agriculture, desertification, cities, etc), and oceans (colour and physical stability of the ocean surface, acidification and calcifying organisms etc.) alike. The changing physico-chemical environment will exert important selective pressures on biological species and communities. Extinction of vulnerable species and explosions of adapted species are to be expected. They will change surface characteristics such as temperature, colour and albedo, gas exchange and atmospheric composition (CO2, NOx, methane). To predict the consequences a good understanding of these feed-back mechanisms is required, both on land and in the oceans.ue

One comment

1. Kalense says:

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   This is an extremely important issue. Until we know how to treat atmosphere, ocean and biota as a single interacting system, our models will be one-sided and liable to make dangerously incorrect predictions.