The Geological Record of Ecological Dynamics Understanding the Biotic Effects of Future Environmental Change (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-11
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The geologic record -- the organic remains, biogeochemical signals, and associated sediments of the geological record -- provides unique access to environmental and ecological history in regions lacking monitoring data and for periods predating human impacts. It also provides information about a broader range of global environmental conditions than exist today, as well as insights into biological processes and consequences that are expressed only over longer time intervals and the opportunity to discover general principles of ecological organization.
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It will also require investments in the infrastructure needed to support collaboration between earth scientists and biologists, and new educational opportunities for earth scientists and biologists early in their careers that encourage them to bridge traditional disciplines. BOX ES.1 Statement of Task Committee on the Geologic Record of Biosphere Dynamics: The Key to Understanding the Biotic Effects of Future Environmental Change The committee will describe the potential of the geologic record as a means of understanding biotic interactions with environmental change and the coupling of earth/life processes, and develop strategies for integrating earth and biological sciences and transferring their combined insights to the policy community.
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The geologic record provides empirical data from longer timescales. This broader perspective both obviates the need to extrapolate ecological behaviors and principles from short-term observations and creates the opportunity to understand the effects of environmental change over an expanded range of temporal and spatial scales.
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Therefore, any comprehensive understanding of ecological dynamics requires that we understand how ecological systems have responded to climate change and variability in the past. Just as the instrumental record of the past two centuries provides an inadequate sample of the range and nature of climate variation, ecological studies based on direct observation in present day systems provide an inadequate sample of the array of biotic responses to climate change, and the potential consequences for biodiversity and biogeochemistry.
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In particular, the development of multiple, independent paleoclimate proxies is providing a rich understanding of past climates, while at the same time liberating paleoecological data from being the primary source of paleoclimate inference. Paleoecological data can now be compared to past climate change inferred from other proxies, allowing direct study of biotic responses to climate changes in the geological record.
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FACILITIES AND INFRASTRUCTURE Funding Research on the geologic record as an ecological laboratory, on the ecological responses to past climate change, and on the ecological legacies of societal activities will require additional funding. Current levels of support are inadequate for the increased activities that these three initiatives will generate.
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Nevertheless, LTER event timescales are short relative to many ecological process and environmental change timescales. Existing LTER projects represent a superb opportunity to leverage relatively unusual long-term ecological and environmental monitoring with observations from times before the instrumental record, in order to acquire information on both the character and rates of environmental change and the biotic components of that change.
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, which targeted global paleoclimates of the Pliocene, demonstrates how federal agencies with intramural researchers can lead collaborative projects, although this particular project emphasized physical environmental reconstruction and improved age determination more than biotic response. This virtual collaboration demonstrated the value of targeting a past interval of geologic time -- rather than a geographic site or region -- to better understand natural systems with relevance to future change.
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Previous recommendations that have focused on geoscience data and collections (NRC, 2002b) , including museum collections, also apply to the broadly interdisciplinary data of both the geoscience and bioscience communities that will be needed to address the complex biosphere issues outlined above.
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of past environments, biotas, and biotic interactions provide the essential evidence needed to assess the nature, rate, and magnitude of the biotic response to that change. Additional research is needed to develop proxy indicators that can be applied in older geohistorical records, to evaluate the preservation of geochemical and biogeochemical proxies, and to develop measures of short-term environmental variability.
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Information from past environmental states, both like and unlike those of the present day, provide the empirical framework needed to discover the general principles of biosphere behavior necessary to predict future change and inform policy managers about the global environment.
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