AUSTRALIA—GERMANY WORKSHOP ON BIODIVERSITY

The Shine Dome, 13-17 March 2006

Response of marine ecosystems to changing climate and biogeochemistry:
clues from the geological record
by Dr Will Howard, Palaeo-oceanographer, Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative
Research Centre

The biological and ecological response to climate change has generated substantial scientific, political and public interest in recent years. Understanding the effects of climate changes on biodiversity will provide insight into wide-ranging areas such as biogeography, fishery ecology, genetic variation and economics. Earth’s climate passed through a series of ice-age cycles during the Late Pleistocene, which provide a history of climate change of similar magnitude to those expected under global warming scenarios (eg, IPCC). The palaeoecological record contains a history of biotic responses to these changes, which provides a set of natural experiments for understanding the rate and magnitude of ecosystems’ responses to climate change. The Pleistocene provides us with a scientific ‘probe’ for exploring the sensitivity of ecosystem structure and, more specifically, biodiversity, to large-scale climate perturbations. As the Pleistocene was also marked by large-scale cycles in atmospheric carbon dioxide, we can explore the role of changing atmospheric and oceanic chemistry in altering ecosystems in ways analogous to the current carbon dioxide build-up and ocean acidification.