Robert Lloyd - a Sir Gar Blog of random news . . . and some Clecs!

Over the next century, plants and animals will need to adapt or shift locations to track their ideal climate in response to continued global warming. In research published today in the journal Nature, Aberystwyth University academic Dr Pippa Moore, along with an international team of scientists from Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, UK and USA, reveals global maps that show how fast and in which direction local climates are shifting. This new study points to a simpler way of looking at climatic changes and their likely effects on biodiversity. “The maps show us where plants and animals will have to move to stay within their existing thermal niches and thereby track climate change,” says Dr Pippa Moore from the Institute for Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences, Aberystwyth University. The study analysed 50 years of sea surface and land temperature data (1960-2009) and also investigated two future scenarios for marine environments (‘business as usual’ and 1.75°C temperature i...

Warming oceans are causing marine species to change breeding times and shift homes with expected substantial consequences for the broader marine landscape according to a new global study. The three-year research project, funded by the National Centre for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in California, has shown widespread systemic shifts in measures such as distribution of species and phenology – the timing of nature’s calendar – on a scale comparable to or greater than those observed on land. The report, Global imprint of climate change on marine life, will form part of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change Assessment Report due for publication in 2014 and is published in this month’s Nature Climate Change. It was undertaken by eminent scientists at 17 institutions across the world, including the University of Queensland, Plymouth University, Aberystwyth University, and the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS). One of the lead authors of the report, Professor Ca...

Research by a scientist from Aberystwyth shows that marine life off the coast of Wales will need to react as quickly as wildlife on land to combat the effects of climate change. It also shows that climate warming is already having an effect in Welsh waters and animals and plants are already moving. The research challenges previous thinking that marine life in the ocean will respond more gradually than on land because of slower warming in the oceans. According to the new research published today in Science, some marine life may need to relocate faster than land species as well as speed up the timing of major life cycle events. The paper’s co-author is Dr Pippa Moore (pictured above) a lecturer in Aquatic Biology at IBERS, the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences at Aberystwyth University. “Analyses of global temperature found that the rate at which marine life needs to relocate in the ocean is as fast, or in some places faster, than for land species,” she says. “Thi...