Leaders: Prof. Mikael Fortelius, Prof. Christoph Scheidegger, Prof. Nils-Christian Stenseth
Countries involved: Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, UK, USA
Field of Research: Climate Change Biology
The integrated climate change biology (iCCB) programme aims at predicting the impact of global change by methods used to describe ecosystems and climate in the deep past. The typical paleontological data available for reconstructing past ecosystems is often very scattered. However, certain features from organisms living in those past ecosystems can be very informative and reveal many aspects of the climate, and type of ecosystem the organisms lived and died in. For example, teeth in grass eating animals can tell many things about the animals diet, and the diet is in fact an important part of the environment namely the prevailing vegetation. Another example of informative organismal features is for instance bones from ground living poikilothermic animals, such as snakes, revealing the size of the animal and therefore also the prevailing temperatures in the ecosystem. Assuming the temperature related physiology of snakes has not changed we can use snakes and in particular, the size of snakes as a thermometer for past climates. These methods in reconstructing past climates and ecosystems are light in their demands on data, teeth or some particular bones of taxa with certain physiological traits can be enough. The methods are also flexible in their applicability, permitting taxon and biome-independent modeling of climates and ecosystems lacking present-day analogues. The iCCB-programme wants to explore the potential of using these methods in predicting the biological transitions due to climate change. This programme brings together the full spectrum of life-sciences to form a system-based framework for the study of the biology of climate change in the past, present, and future.
