Sentences with phrase «abrupt ecological changes»
Now, researchers reporting April 21 in Current Biology suggest that abrupt ecological changes following a meteor impact may have been more detrimental to carnivorous bird - like dinosaurs, and early modern birds with toothless beaks were able to survive on seeds when other food sources declined.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/ Not exact matches
A particular challenge for science is the growing evidence that social - ecological interactions across scales can generate regime shifts where profound and abrupt changes can occur in systems ranging from local ecosystems (such as lakes) to large biomes (such as the Arctic); from local communities (such as farming systems) to regional economic sectors (e.g., global fisheries).
«In fact, understanding abrupt change in ecological systems is among the biggest challenges in contemporary ecology.»
While extreme events per se are not abrupt climate changes as defined in this report, changes in extreme events could lead to abrupt changes in two ways: (1) an abrupt change in a weather or climate extremes regime, for example a sudden shift to persistent drought conditions; or (2) a gradual trend in the frequency or severity of extremes that causes abrupt impacts when societal or ecological thresholds are crossed, as illustrated in Figure 2.10.
Ecological surprises include rapid and abrupt changes in temperature and precipitation, leading to an increase in extreme events such as floods, fires and landslides, increases in eutrophication, invasion by alien species, or rapid and sudden increases in disease (Carpenter et al., 2005).
In addition, the committee is grateful to the participants of the Workshop on the Economic and Ecological Impacts of Abrupt Climate Change for their insights and written reports, parts of which have been incorporated into this report: Craig Allen, Edward Cook, Peter Daszak, Mark Dyurgerov, David Inouye, Klaus Keller, George Kling, Walter Koenig, Carl Leopold, Thomas Lowell, Robert Mendelsohn, John Reilly, Joel Smith, Thomas Swetnam, Richard Tol, Ferenc Toth, Harvey Weiss, John Weyant, and Gary Yohe.