COS 112-8
Probing heterogeneity in ecological responses to climate change
How do we use information about climate change to better protect natural lands and resources, food security, and public health? First and foremost, this requires better coming to terms with what we can and cannot know about the future: what can we predict, what can we not predict, and why? We propose that much of the answer to these questions may exist in the patterns of heterogeneity in ecological responses to contemporary climate change. Heterogeneity is increasingly reported in the ecological literature on climate change, but primarily as an observation in work focused elsewhere rather than as a research focus in and of itself. Is heterogeneity nothing more than a scattered observation without any deeper revelatory meaning, or is it an essential feature of climate-driven ecological change that could prove enormously instructive about the processes underlying ecological responses to climate change at different scales?
Using datasets on contemporary changes in Arctic ecosystems, in grasslands around the world, and in patterns of infectious disease, our research asks what we can learn from the incidence and magnitude of heterogeneity in ecological responses to climate change, from the scales over which it manifests, and from the types of responses most prone to it.
Results/Conclusions
Our analyses show that heterogeneity varies with both the spatial scale and with the level of biological resolution at which responses to climate change are considered. Moreover, we show that our ability to explain patterns of heterogeneity also varies across scales and forms of response. These are promising results, but the biggest lesson from our analyses is the importance of data accessibility. Even in an age when many journals insist on raw data accessibility as a condition of research publication, there is too little follow-through and accountability when it actually comes to making data available. In 2014, the greatest challenge to answering critical questions about the predictability of ecological responses to climate change may simply be the generally poor data-sharing practices that still pervade our science.