Climate change and geothermal ecosystems: natural laboratories, sentinel systems, and future refugia
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Understanding and predicting how global warming affects the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems is a key challenge of the 21st century. Isolated laboratory and field experiments testing global change hypotheses have been criticized for being too small-scale and overly simplistic, whereas surveys are inferential and often confound temperature with other drivers. Research that utilizes natural thermal gradients offers a more promising approach and geothermal ecosystems in particular, which span a range of temperatures within a single biogeographic area, allow us to take the laboratory into nature rather than vice versa. By isolating temperature from other drivers, its ecological effects can be quantified without any loss of realism, and transient and equilibrial responses can be measured in the same system across scales that are not feasible using other empirical methods. Embedding manipulative experiments within geothermal gradients is an especially powerful approach, informing us to what extent small-scale experiments can predict the future behaviour of real ecosystems. Geothermal areas also act as sentinel systems by tracking responses of ecological networks to warming and helping to maintain ecosystem functioning in a changing landscape by providing sources of organisms that are preadapted to different climatic conditions. Here, we highlight the emerging use of geothermal systems in climate change research, identify novel research avenues, and assess their roles for catalysing our understanding of ecological and evolutionary responses to global warming.
Date Issued
2014-06-02
Date Acceptance
2014-04-12
Citation
Global Change Biology, 2014, 20 (11), pp.3291-3299
ISSN
1365-2486
Publisher
Wiley
Start Page
3291
End Page
3299
Journal / Book Title
Global Change Biology
Volume
20
Issue
11
Copyright Statement
© 2014 The Authors. Global Change Biology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Sponsor
Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
Identifier
http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000343762800001&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=1ba7043ffcc86c417c072aa74d649202
Grant Number
NE/I009280/2
Subjects
Science & Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Biodiversity Conservation
Ecology
Environmental Sciences
Biodiversity & Conservation
Environmental Sciences & Ecology
Aquatic
Arctic
Complexity
Global warming
Natural experiment
Spatial and temporal scale
Terrestrial
Whole-stream warming
aquatic
complexity
global warming
natural experiment
spatial and temporal scale
terrestrial
whole-stream warming
Biological Evolution
Climate Change
Ecosystem
Global Warming
Hot Springs
Biological Sciences
Publication Status
Published