In March 19-21 2013, I made my second visit to the annual Student Conference on Conservation Science in Cambridge, UK. Here is a summary on my visit.
Plenaries
Yadvinder Malhi from the University of Oxford gave a talk on the impact of climate change on tropical forest function and diversity. He started by presenting several environmental factors that could affect the vegetation structure and the overall gain of biomass in varying ways under changing climate. Next, he pointed out that our knowledge on the overall response of the biosphere to the increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is still quite limited. He presented data on recent small-scale and large-scale studies in the tropical areas that have indicated higher-than-predicted gain of biomass in several tropical areas within the past years. (However, studies have also indicated severe periods of droughts and changes in the relative abundances of species.) Then he moved on to demonstrate how much this uncertainty affects vegetation change predictions under climate change scenarios. The scenarios he showed, with the hypothesized biomass gain response to the increasing CO2 concentrations included, gave an impression that the effects of climate change on the Amazon rainforests may not necessarily be as catastrophic as previously thought. However, numerous unknown factors remain. For tropical plants, there is very little knowledge on their thermal tolerance ranges.
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