Background
It is now clear that 22nd century ecosystems will be drastically different from what we know today: up to 39% of the Earth’s surface may experience new climates by 2100. In the face of such rapid and unprecedented change, we need all possible information how to mitigate and adapt to changes, It is possible that Earth’s climate is heading into a climate regime that was last realized more than 30 million years ago. We need to know how ecological systems functioned in such extreme conditions.
For example, we need to know how ecological systems turnover in the face of long-term trending climate change, and if functional diversity remains constant through time or ecological systems collapse due to a loss of functional diversity. To move away from species identities and toward how ecological systems function, we utilize a community level functional trait-based approach known as ecometrics. Ecometrics is an approach that uses the traits-environment relationship to diagnose past environments.
Ecometrics allows for comparisons of ecological systems across space and through time, because it is focused at the community level. Thus, communities with different compositions may be compared. This is an important and timely approach to develop, because with our changing climate will come changing communities. Importantly, this approach can be used across different scales of space and time. previously, iCCB has brought together working groups of ecologists, palaeontologists, climate modellers, and conservation biologists to address the issue of integration. A trait-based, community approach emerged from these discussions. In the last phase we concentrated on developing modeling approaches around it and integrating the modern and fossil data. The next phase of iCCB is to bring this integration to conclusion and including policymakers to our program to develop a new program, based on the iCCB initiative.