Rainforest Biodiversity & Global Climate Change Flashcards
For what the Wet Tropics World heritage was established?
Primarily to protect the unique biodiversity and evolutionary history within the region.
What does effective management and conservation relies on ?
It relies on the understanding the patterns of biodiversity, the processes causing these patterns and how changes will impact on these processes.
What do you need to understand of biodiversity?
Speciation, extinction, distributions, abundante, current & historical biogeography, interactions with other species and movement patterns.
What about speciation in the wet tropics of Australia?
Most species are very old, predate Pleistocene ice ages, relatively insignificant at species level, very significant at genetic level, many examples now of ongoing evolutionary processes
What about extinction in the wet tropics in Australia?
Al evidence suggests that this is probably the MOST important in current biodiversity factor, localised extinctions of species during the ice-ages, places that have stable rainforest there is not many extinctions but unstable rainforest there has been a los of extinction of species .
What about distributions in the wet tropics?
Species preferences & tolerance, current envirornment, historical environment, biotic interactions (really dificult in rainforest) , distirbance (natural & human).
How to see abudance of species ?
Do many surveys to see How much species are in an area.
What does the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say?
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal: the ocean and atmosphere have warmed, amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, etc. Each of the last three decades have been warmed.
Why they are uncertanties on predictions ?
Depends in what people are going to do.
What will happen with climate change?
More extreme weather seasons, decrease of artic ice or total disapereance in summer.
What will happen with climate change in rainforest?
Since the environment will be warmer many species that are not adapted to does temperatures will go extinct. Between 18% to 35% species will go extinct this centuary.
What to do ?
See vulnerability of species and try to see if there is a solution.
What are the important impacts?
Extreme impacts are the most unpredictable and they are the ones that cause more damage and species extinctions .
What do they do?
Found cooler areas (cool refugia) and protect then.
70s and 80s What happened in Australia?
Save the rainforest campaign, world heritage listing 1988 and the wet tropics management Authority was formed
