Under the Weather Climate, Ecosystems, and Infectious Disease (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Temporal and Spatial Scaling: An Ecological Perspective
Temporal and Spatial Scaling: An Ecological Perspective
Pages 80-85
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From page 80... ...
BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF OBSERVED CLIMATE VARIABILITY As discussed in Chapter 3, climate varies naturally on a wide range of temporal and spatial scales, and over the past century, the global climate has been gradually warming. Climate can also be manipulated under controlled experimental conditions to achieve variability at prescribed time scales.
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From page 81... ...
For example, climatic variations associated with the ENSO, with multi-year droughts, and with multidecadal monsoon and hurricane cycles are known to correlate with vegetation productivity, bird-nesting success, abundance of insects, and numerous other ecological parameters (e.g., Levins et al., 1994; Tucker et al., 1991~. On much longer time scales, the ecological changes caused by the "little ice age" and glacial-interglacial transitions and longer-term climate changes can be enormous, including huge range shifts or even extinction of species (Campbell and McAndrews, 1993; Davis and Zabinski, 1992; Webb, 1986)
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From page 82... ...
For instance, factors such as soil quality constrain plant species composition and growth rates, and the mechanisms shaping soil quality operate over time scales that are relatively long compared to the time frame of AGCC. Thus, over sufficiently long time intervals, plant distributions are likely to correlate with climate change, but those correlations may not provide much insight into short-term responses of plants to AGCC.
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From page 83... ...
The first is that the changes in ecological parameters along spatial gradients are actually driven by the associated climate gradients. The second, called the "space-for-time" assumption, is that the mechanisms of ecological change over time (on decadal to century time scales characteristic of AGCC)
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From page 84... ...
Ecological phenomena often depend on climate parameters in highly nonlinear ways, and thus the differences in magnitude between natural climate variability cycles and AGCC can confound efforts at prediction. The mismatch in time scales necessitates the application of reliable interpolation procedures to predict the effects of a relatively small change in temperature (AGCC)
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From page 85... ...
In contrast, in the trypanosomiasis/tsetse fly system of sub-Saharan Africa, vector dynamics are critically influenced by natural ecosystems that are subject to uncertain change in the face of AGCC, and in this example there may be scaling problems inherent in using observed climate variability responses to anticipate AGCC responses. Malaria may present an "intermediate" example, since the environments that foster its transmission range from quasi-stable ecosystems (e.g., rice-growing regions)
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