Botanists View Global Biological Change in Special Issue

August 16, 2013- Many scientists are collaborating across disciplines, exchanging data and building models to track how climate change, including global warming, is affecting organisms and ecosystems.

A recent ScienceDaily.com post highlights a new series of articles in the American Journal of Botany's Special Issue on Global Biological Change that highlights many crucial roles plants play in global ecosystems.

ScienceDaily.com provides some background, writing, "Global change includes topics such as increasing carbon dioxide and its effect on climate, habitat fragmentation and changes in how protected and agricultural lands are used or managed, increases in alien species invasions, and increased use of resources by humans. There is increasing concern that these changes will have rapid and irreversible impacts on our climate, our resources, our ecosystems, and ultimately on life, as we know it."

The Special Issue is referred to as "a diverse series of work from botanists spanning disciplines from taxonomy and morphology to ecology and evolution, from traditional to multidisciplinary approaches, and from observations and experiments to modeling and reviews, to help synthesize our knowledge and stimulate new approaches to tackling these global biological change issues."

In their introduction to the Special Issue, the American Journal of Botany's editors outline some of the challenges: What affect does Global Climate Change have on plants? How can biological change be forecasted? And what systems, processes and organisms are most vulnerable, and can resilience to Global Climate Change be enhanced?

ScienceDaily quotes one of the editors, Ann Sakai (University of California, Irvine), "In this Special Issue we bring together different botanical perspectives with the hope that the integration of these approaches will allow researchers to better answer these and other challenging questions related to global biological change."

Read the full post here

The full text of Botany and a Changing World: Introduction to the Special Issue on Global Biological Change is available here.

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