UCLA life scientists provide important new details on how
climate change will affect interactions between species in research published
online May 21 in the Journal of Animal Ecology. This knowledge, they say, is
critical to making accurate predictions and informing policymakers of how
species are likely to be impacted by rising temperatures.
"There is a growing recognition among biologists that
climate change is affecting how species interact with one another, and that
this is going to have very important consequences for the stability and
functioning of ecosystems," said the senior author of the research, Van
Savage, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and of
biomathematics at UCLA. "However, there is still a very limited
understanding of exactly what these changes will be. Our paper makes progress
on this very important question."