Biodiversity and Climate Change

Efforts to elucidate the effect of climate change on biodiversity with detailed data sets and refined models reach novel conclusions. Over the past decade, several models have been developed to predict the impact of climate change on biodiversity. Results from these models have suggested some alarming consequences of climate change for biodiversity, predicting, for example, that in the next century many plants and animals will go extinct (1) and there could be a large-scale dieback of tropical rainforests (2). However, caution may be required in interpreting results from these models, not least because their coarse spatial scales fail to capture topography or “microclimatic buffering” and they often do not consider the full acclimation capacity of plants and animals (3). Several recent studies indicate that taking these factors into consideration can seriously alter the model predictions (4–7).

利用详细数据集和精确模型来阐明气候变化对生物多样性影响的研究得出了新的结论。在过去十年中，已经开发了若干模型来预测气候变化对生物多样性的影响。这些模型的结果表明气候变化对生物多样性产生了一些令人担忧的后果，例如预测在下个世纪许多动植物将会灭绝（1），并且热带雨林可能会大规模枯萎（2）。然而，在解读这些模型的结果时可能需要谨慎，尤其是因为它们粗糙的空间尺度无法捕捉地形或“微气候缓冲”，而且它们往往没有考虑动植物的完全适应能力（3）。最近的几项研究表明，考虑这些因素会严重改变模型的预测结果（4 - 7）。