Interesting new research explaining
how what, to me at least, seems intuitively true: The greater the biodiversity
in an ecosystem, the greater chance that any species will be able to adapt to
climate change. It applies to communities and human economies too. But first,
the research.
Published in Evolutionary
Applications, research for the National Institute for Mathematical and
Billogical Synthesis shows,
In some cases evolution can rescue plant-pollinator
mutalisms that would otherwise become extinct as a result of climate change.
Whether a mutalism survives, however, can depend on upon the density and
distribution of other species in the community. For example, under many
circumstances, the presence of alternative pollinators available to the focal
plant can help to protect both the focal plant and the focal pollinator from
extinction.
More basically, say there are two
species who have evolved to be dependent upon one another -- a plant depends on
a particular insect to pollinate it and the insect depends on that plant in
return. If climate change has differing impacts at differing times to each of
them -- say, the plant starts flowering before the insects arrive, or the
insects arrive earlier because of changing temperatures elsewhere and the plant
isn't yet flowering -- then both species may be in danger of extinction. Or at
least face a much harder time adapting to the changing climatic conditions. But
if there is greater biodiversity, there may be alternative pollinators to take
up the slack, if you will.
In even greater brevity: When you
reduce biodiversity, you reduce possible interactions, you reduce possible
avenues of change, you start closing off differing ways of coping.
Paper lead author Tucker Gilman
says,
Habitat fragmentation or loss of native pollinators might
compound the threat of climate change to mutalisms. The results are troubling
because anthropogenic climate change is thought to be happening up to ten times
faster than any natural climate change in the past 500,000 years. This means
that mutalisms that have survived past climate change events may still be
vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change.
Really, as I started to say, this
applies to communities and economies as well. The greater the diversity of
business, people, thoughts, ways of expression (here, the loss of differing
languages and cosmologies is apropos to environmentalism), the greater the
number of possible permutations of the expression of consciousness and
existence itself and the easier it is for these to become manifest.
A city or nation that devotes itself
to too few types of economic activity is more easily shocked when that source
of prosperity is disrupted (for whatever reason). A community with a tightly
circumscribed boundary around the types of people that live there, the
political, cosmological or ethical viewpoints, is more easily shocked. On a
personal level it applies as well, in terms of the types of viewpoints that you
regularly hear on any given subject.
Of course, simply having this
diversity is no guarantor that the best path forward in any given circumstance
will be chosen -- just as having ample biodiversity is no guarantee that any
specific species will be able to adapt to climate change. But the more routes
around disaster, disruption, or just distraction are present, the easier it is
to avoid it.
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