Ecology and Climate
Ecosystems and climate change are the subjects of a paper by Malhi et al. (2020) which forms part of a Royal Society publication on the “threats, opportunities and solutions” pertaining to this area. The authors explore “how ecosystems respond to climate change”, how their resilience can be enhanced and how they can “assist in addressing the challenge of a changing climate.” A number of papers on the interaction between climate change and the biosphere are introduced, five of which are outlined below. Turner et al. (2020) are concerned with abrupt changes in ecological systems and the research agenda needed for diagnosing them. As examples of such changes they list coral bleaching, changes to kelp forests, ice loss, soaring tree mortality, plummeting forest carbon uptake, and more frequent and severe fires. Such changes have profound consequences for ecosystems and human wellbeing and it is important to understand them. Changes to ecosystems can be driven by many factors ot