2024-08-27 08:15:58
A new study shows that the resistance of terrestrial ecosystems to global climate change decreases significantly as environmental pressures increase, especially when these are sustained over time.
The study was carried out by an international team led by the Laboratory for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning (BioFunLab), Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology of Seville (IRNAS), which is attached to the High Council for Scientific Research (CISC), in Spain. .
The authors of the study have reached this conclusion after analyzing 1,023 global change experiments around the world in collaboration with ten institutions, including the University of Alicante in Spain; the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Halle-Jena-Leipzig; Northeast China Forestry University; The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States and the University of New South Wales in Australia.
“Terrestrial ecosystems are subject to numerous factors of climate change and environmental degradation, including global warming, drought processes, atmospheric pollution, fires or overgrazing, among many others. We know that these factors affect the ability of our ecosystems to provide services such as carbon sequestration or soil fertility, which are crucial in the fight against climate change and food production,” explains Manuel Delgado Baquerizo, head of the BioFunLab and co-author of the new study. “What we didn’t know,” he says, “is that increasing the number of these factors affects the ability of ecosystems to resist global change as they become more sensitive.”
Open forest in New South Wales, Australia. (Photo: Manuel Delgado Baquerizo)
The continuing effects of global change
The study also shows that when the effects of global change continue, terrestrial ecosystems see their natural ability to resist an increase in reducing factors. This was confirmed after analyzing data from a 15-year experiment based in the United States, which includes the impacts of multiple global change factors on ecosystem services such as primary production. “Our results show that prolonged exposure to multiple drivers of global change, such as increased carbon dioxide and warming, gradually reduces the ability of ecosystems to maintain essential services such as primary productivity. This is essential to understand the limitations we will face in vital resources such as soil fertility” explains Emilio Guirado, from the University of Alicante and co-author of the study.
For his part, Guiyao Zhou, the main author of the study and a member of the BioFunLab, said that the study shows that “the effect of the increase in global change factors on the resistance of ecosystems is much more significant in terms of their capacity. to provide ecosystem services rather than the biodiversity of our ecosystem.” “These results show that reducing the number of global change factors associated with human activity is related to the sustainability of our ecosystem,” concludes Zhou.
The title of the study is “Resistance of ecosystem services to global change weakened by increasing number of environmental stressors.” And it has been published in the academic journal Nature Geoscience. (Source: CSIC)
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