How do scientists measure the impact of climate change on biodiversity?
In: Planetary Science
It isn’t normally as clear cut as that, biodiversity with be under threat from a number of different causes, land use for farming, pesticides and pollution, hunting and many other causes climate change may cause the final tipping point for biodiversity in a particular ecosystem, but saying this level of climate change did this much damage is far too simple for such a complex system as life.
There are a lot of factors that play into biodiversity loss; climate change accelerates many of them. What biologists and climatologists generally do is extrapolate from existing data, and assess what we already know about how the ecosystem functions.
We know, for example, that every living thing exists in a particular biome, with particular food sources and predators. We also know that nothing on the planet exists in isolation: predators migrate toward the most abundant sources of prey, herbivores move when *their* food sources become scarce, pollinators seek out new sources of pollen, and so forth.
That’s why warmer temperatures and changes in weather patterns affect biodiversity: plants and animals generally don’t do well outside of their particular temperature range. The plants die off, and the herbivores move on to find more abundant food sources. The predators move, too, because there are fewer prey animals in their current territory. The pollinators are forced to travel farther and farther afield, and populations crash because not enough of them can successfully return to the hive.
That’s the ELI5 version, at least — I’m not a biologist or climatologist, so I can’t be any more specific. 🙂
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