A report of the wonderful workshop held in Eugene, OR last summer about climate refugia has now appeared in New Phytologist. There we summarise the interesting discussions we had between a varied group of palaeoecologists, climatologists, modellers, phylogeographers and geneticists.
Climate change is challenging the predictive ability of ecologists, evolutionary biologists and scientists as a whole. We are urged to anticipate the impacts in order to attempt mitigation, but reliable forecasts of the future dynamics of …
Investigating the effects of past climate change on species ranges can be a fruitful way to improve our ecological understanding and predictive abilities for future periods. To date, this retrospective knowledge has mostly been based on fossils, …
Although global warming is currently threatening biodiversity, we know from past records that cooling periods can also be disastrous in terms of extinction rates. During the Eocene, about 50 million years ago, the Earth was so warm that there were no permanent ice caps in the poles, and warm-loving subtropical species thrived at quite high latitudes.
Climate on Earth has always been changing. Despite decades of investigation, our limited knowledge of the ecological and evolutionary effects of climate changes often translates into uncertain predictions about the impact of future climates on …
The forests in the Iberian Peninsula have been strongly influenced by past climatic changes, but reconstructing their historical distributions and dynamics is very difficult due to the complex climatic characteristics and relief of the region. …