Track: Organized Oral Session
Luke Frishkoff
Department of Biology, University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, TX, USA
Alison Ke
Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology, University of California, Davis
Davis, CA, USA
Rounak Patra
Department of Biosystems Engineering & Soil Science, University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN, USA
Human activities are restructuring Earth’s biota, straining the vital connections between anthropogenic and natural systems. Land-use and climate change are the primary anthropogenic forces transforming terrestrial biological populations, communities, and ecosystems. Regionally, changing climatic conditions have altered species distributions. At local and landscape scales, habitat conversion and fragmentation are causing population declines and extirpations of some species, as well as expansions of other species. While many studies explore either land-use or climate change effects in isolation, their combined, interactive impacts remain a largely unexplored research frontier. Understanding how land-use X climate interactions affect biodiversity is crucial for characterizing, forecasting, and ultimately managing biotic communities in the Anthropocene. For example, the effects of land-use change on biodiversity may massively deviate from our expectations in specific climate zones, or under specific trajectories of climate change, leaving us ill-prepared to preserve the ecosystems of the future. The past few years have seen a marked increase in studies exploring interactive effects of these global change drivers. Such studies leverage both carefully designed natural experiments along environmental gradients as well as a proliferation of massive, global datasets including data deriving from citizen science efforts, remote sensing, and quantitative syntheses. This Organized Oral Session endeavors to move towards developing new frameworks for integrating natural experiments with each of these opportunistic, ‘big data’ sources to predict how climate and land-use change are interactively restructuring biological communities. Our session will investigate how land-use X climate interactions are reshaping biodiversity patterns by shifting (1) organismal movements, population sizes and trajectories, (2) community composition and spatial-organization, and (3) species’ ranges across latitudes and elevations. For example, habitat loss may preclude species from shifting their ranges with climate change, climate change may promote habitat loss by expanding agricultural growing regions into new locations, and both pressures may favor and threaten similar species, homogenizing biodiversity at broad spatial scales. More specifically, we aim to address three core questions. First, how common are land-use X climate interactions in shaping community structure, and do these interactions typically exacerbate or ameliorate the consequences of global change? Second, in which climate zones are the effects of human land-use most detrimental to biodiversity, and (correspondingly) which land-use types are most likely to lose biodiversity as a result of ongoing climate change? Third, how and for which types of species will land-use change curtail or facilitate needed range shifts in the face of changing climates?
Presenting Author: Luke Frishkoff – Department of Biology, University of Texas at Arlington
Presenting Author: Timothy C. Bonebrake – School of Biological Sciences, The University of Hong Kong
Presenting Author: Rebecca A. Senior – Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield
Presenting Author: Matthew G. Betts – Forest Ecosystems and Society, Oregon State University
Presenting Author: Marta A. Jarzyna – Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology, The Ohio State University
Presenting Author: Tim Newbold – Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research, University College London