Understanding and forecasting biological responses to climate change

ABSTRACT: Despite considerable effort, biologists remains uncertain as to how, when and why species and ecosystems respond to climate change. A major cause of this uncertainty is a traditional reliance on correlative methods. However, responses to climate change are often delayed, sometimes abrupt, and almost always governed by complex processes and feedbacks that do not lend themselves to being studied using correlative approaches. Dr Maclean will showcase recent advances in bottom-up mechanistic approaches. These interdisciplinary approaches, which bridge physics, remote-sensing, micrometeorology, earth system dynamics and crop science are designed to differentiate between causal drivers of responses to environmental change and to quantify the feedbacks between processes that delay or accelerate change. He will demonstrate how such approaches can be applied to understand and forecast the response of wild species and agricultural crops to climate change and to inform policy and practise.