Abstract for talk, "Climate Change and Wild Life: Understanding Recent Impacts and Projecting into the Future" by Camille Parmesan

Long-term climatic trends shape the tapestry of life in the wild. This basic knowledge, however, does little to address what anthropogenic climate change means for wild species. Two issues which plagued consensus-building within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were the issues of "attribution" and "impacts". Recent global analyses have addressed this "attribution" question and concluded that the fingerprint of climate change impacts has been detected in species in natural systems. Detailed predictions are not necessary to argue that anthropogenic climate change will have profound importance on the preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. But the conservation community is increasingly worried about how to preserve biodiversity in the face of even the mildest climate change projections. Conservation planning will ultimately rely on detailed knowledge of how climate drives the basic biologies of individual species, communities and ecosystems. Some lessons can be gained by careful study of the responses already documented from the past 100 years. Combining information from current responses with those from past major climate transitions may provide a crucial guide for minimizing negative impacts of future climate change.