Quantitative approaches in climate change ecology

By C. Brown, D. Schoeman, William J. Sydeman, K. Brander, Lauren B. Buckley, M. Burrows, Carlos M. Duarte, Pippa J. Moore, J. Pandolfi, E. Poloczanska and 2 more. Global Change Biology, 2011

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Contemporary impacts of anthropogenic climate change on ecosystems are increasingly being recognized. Documenting the extent of these impacts requires quantitative tools for analyses of ecological observations to distinguish climate impacts in noisy data and to understand interactions between climate variability and other drivers of change. To assist the development of reliable statistical approaches, we review the marine climate change literature and provide suggestions for quantitative approaches in climate change ecology. We compiled 267 peer‐reviewed articles that examined relationships between climate change and marine ecological variables. Of the articles with time series data (n = 186), 75% used statistics to test for a dependency of ecological variables on climate variables. We identified several common weaknesses in statistical approaches, including marginalizing other important non‐climate drivers of change, ignoring temporal and spatial autocorrelation, averaging across spatial patterns and not reporting key metrics. We provide a list of issues that need to be addressed to make inferences more defensible, including the consideration of (i) data limitations and the comparability of data sets; (ii) alternative mechanisms for change; (iii) appropriate response variables; (iv) a suitable model for the process under study; (v) temporal autocorrelation; (vi) spatial autocorrelation and patterns; and (vii) the reporting of rates of change. While the focus of our review was marine studies, these suggestions are equally applicable to terrestrial studies. Consideration of these suggestions will help advance global knowledge of climate impacts and understanding of the processes driving ecological change.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/047eb1c0a8845840f79d560f0035990e29183512

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Citations in the corpus

Mangrove and Seagrass Beds Provide Different Biogeochemical Services for Corals Threatened by Climate Change (2016, background): “Consequently, 92 understanding the nature and intricacies of the impacts of ocean acidification, and how it 93 interacts with other stressors, remains a critical priority for reef scientists (Hoegh-Guldberg and 94 Bruno, 2010; Brown et al., 2011; Wernberg et al., 2012).”
A statistical framework to explore ontogenetic growth variation among individuals and populations: a marine fish example (2015, background): “The Area intercept induces correlation among Years and Cohorts within an area and allows drawing spatial and temporal inferences about growth variation without having to estimate spatial autocorrelation structures (Brown et al. 2011).”
InSTREAM-Gen: Modelling eco-evolutionary dynamics of trout populations under anthropogenic environmental change (2016, background): “Quantifying the maximum rate of environmental hange that populations can cope with becomes critical to devise daptive management responses to global environmental change Chevin et al., 2010; Brown et al., 2011).”
A decade of climate change experiments on marine organisms: procedures, patterns and problems (2012, background): “Studies aiming to identify climate change as a driver of marine ecological change, either through observational analyses of time-series (Brown et al., 2011) or experimental manipulations of climate change factors (this study), have increased similarly, although only accounting for 18% and 13% of all”
Beyond long-term averages: making biological sense of a rapidly changing world (2014, methodology): “, present day +2°C), using climatic means [57-59].”
Climate‐induced changes in the distribution of freshwater fish: observed and predicted trends (2013, background): “From a methodological point of view, the empirical evidence of climate-induced changes in freshwater fish distribution need to be related statistically to trends in climate using appropriate approaches (reviewed in Brown et al., 2011), as sufficiently robust approaches have rarely been used so far.”
Defining and observing stages of climate-mediated range shifts in marine systems (2014, background): “abundance data are sparse, especially in the ocean, where observations are logistically challenging and often limited to commercially important species (Brown et al., 2011; Richardson and Poloczanska, 2008).”
Potential movement of fish and shellfish stocks from the sub-Arctic to the Arctic Ocean (2013, background): “Brown et al. (2011a) found that recent attempts to estimate the impact of climate change on fish distribution suffered from methodological shortcomings, and uncertainties remain generally underestimated (Planque et al., 2011).”