Biodiversity Seminar: Does the rate or the magnitude of climate change matter more?

When it comes to heat, this year has been one for the record books.  September temperatures alone were an astonishing 1.44℃ warmer than the 20^th century average. The effects of this warmth were likewise dramatic, from the loss of ice volume in Switzerland’s glaciers to the burning of extensive tracks of eastern Canadian forest.  This is climate change in action. As the global community works to reduce the carbon footprint of humanity, a pressing question is what we should be optimizing first. Specifically, for biodiversity, is it the absolute magnitude or is it the rate of change that matters most?   In this talk, I will discuss ancient and modern insights into this question in the context of the research that I will be carrying out during my time at the WSL.

Pincelli Hull is an Associate Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Yale University and a fellow at WSL.

The tangled web of life on Earth has woven, and been woven by, interactions and feedbacks with the living and non-living components of the earth system. The diversity of the biosphere is a product of these, often non-linear, interactions occurring over successive generations. The goal of research in the Hull Lab is to investigate how these patterns and dynamics have changed under different boundary conditions—including during catastrophic disturbances.

Our research informs questions related to modern global change including understanding how ecosystems behave during and after mass extinctions, how the carbon cycle interacts with the ocean-atmosphere system, and why species and communities adapt (or not) to widespread changes in environmental conditions.

Our research tools and topics are varied, but for many lab members our primary lens into the history of Earth-life interactions are protists known as foraminifera from the open-ocean ecosystems that have always accounted for the vast majority of Earth’s habitable volume.

Lab website

Our seminars are hybrid. Please send an email to events-biodiversity(at)wsl.ch if you would like to get access to the live stream.

The Biodiversity Seminar Series are organized by the WSL Biodiversity Center. Every two weeks, we aim to host a seminar speaker that presents research or outreach on topics relevant to the biodiversity community at WSL. The seminars are public and are usually broadcasted online.

Find out more about the WSL Biodiversity Center and a complete list of events here:

https://www.wsl.ch/en/about-wsl/organisation/programmes-and-initiatives/wsl-biodiversity-center.html

Please send an email to events-biodiversity(at)wsl.ch if you would like to be updated on the activities of the WSL Biodiversity Center.