Date: May 16, 2017
Source: Netherlands Institute of
Ecology (NIOO-KNAW)
An oystercatcher nest is washed
away in a storm surge. Australian passerine birds die during a heatwave. A late
frost in their breeding area kills off a group of American cliff swallows.
Small tragedies that may seem unrelated, but point to the underlying long-term
impact of extreme climatic events. In the special June issue of Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B researchers of the Netherlands Institute of
Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) launch a new approach to these 'extreme' studies.
Extremes, outliers, cataclysms.
As a field of biological research it's still in its infancy, but interest in
the impact of extreme weather and climate events on nature is growing rapidly.
That's partly because it is now increasingly clear that the impact of extreme
events on animal behaviour, ecology and evolution could well be greater than
that of the 'normal' periods in between. And partly because the frequency of
such events is likely to increase, due to climate change.
Not 1 to 1
But how do we define extreme
events in the first place? That's problematic, explain NIOO researchers Marcel
Visser and Martijn van de Pol. "For climatologists, weather has to be
warmer, colder or more extreme in another way than it is 95% of the time. But
that doesn't necessarily make it extreme in terms of its impact on nature.
There isn't a 1 to 1 correspondence."
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