Foundations of the Earth by H.H. Shugart

Author:H.H. Shugart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI026000, Science/Environmental Science, SCI020000, Science/Life Sciences/Ecology
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-07-08T04:00:00+00:00

CLIMATE-VEGETATION RELATIONSHIPS IN A CHANGING WORLD

Two hundred years after Alexander von Humboldt, we have learned a lot about the vegetation of the Earth and how it is related to climate, soils, and associated human society—all classic Humboldtian themes. Attempts to understand more clearly environmental interactions with the planet’s vegetation have continued to occupy ecologists to the present day. Ecologists still have a lot to argue about and many theories to test. However, we have a substantial new problem, one with which the plant geographers from earlier eras did not concern themselves.

To paraphrase Alexander von Humboldt, Alles ist Wechselwirkung aber einige Verbindungen neue sind—everything is interconnected, but some connections are new. We are challenged to understand what the future vegetation might be on our planet with a different, human-altered climate and a level of carbon dioxide (along with other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere not seen for millions of years.

Two interdependent, fundamental issues must be resolved to evaluate the effect of climate change on ecosystems. First, what aspects of the ecosystem does one wish to understand? How is the ecosystem resolved in time, space, or complexity? To understand climate change’s effects on vegetation, must one understand the leaf response, the whole plant response, the population response, or somehow all of these and more? If so, how does one synthesize among these levels to understand the ecosystem’s response to climate change?

Second, what environmental factors dominate the response of whatever aspect we wish to understand? What are the controlling factors? Most importantly, will the importance of these environmental factors change under novel conditions? In particular, will the importance of factors change with an increase in the CO2 levels of the atmosphere—which has already happened to a degree from human actions and will continue to do so? Or, under novel climatic conditions, will new factors control the natural system response?

These questions stem from ecology’s historical roots—from ancient philosophers such as Theophrastus; from the brave ecological explorers such as Joseph Banks, Alexander von Humboldt, and Darwin; from the plant geographers of the nineteenth century; and from the proto-ecosystem ecologists and vegetation scientists of the last century. The essential need for scientific understanding that drove centuries of scientists to explore the world is brought into fresh immediacy by present-day challenges of understanding the consequences of global environmental change.

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