Christopher K. Wikle

Consensus has been building in recent decades that human activities are contributing to substantial modification of the Earth’s climate system, leading to growing interest in the detection and assessment of potential biological impacts associated with this changing climate. Multiple approaches have attempted to link ecological impacts with climate change, but all have been limited, more or less, by the difficulty of adequately representing ecosystem complexities in these analyses.

That is, to understand how an ecosystem will respond to climate changes requires accounting for the myriad interactions between biological and physical processes across spatial scales ranging from very local to global, and temporal scales ranging from within a day to decades.

This problem is particularly visible in ecological processes that exhibit synchrony, which can be defined to occur when critical phases of species’ life cycles are closely linked to temporal cycles in environmental variables. For example, the onset of budding in a plant is tied to light availability and temperature, and the return of migratory waterfowl in the spring could be affected by weather conditions at various geographical locations.

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