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South Florida Mangroves Are On A Death March, Marking A New Era For Earth
Mangroves running for their lives may have just hit the end of the road. The problem is so clear, it might be the first real sign Earth has entered a new geological era. Using a combination of aerial photographs from the 1930s, modern satellite imagery and ground sediment samples,
FIU Sea Level Solutions Center researchers
Randall W. Parkinson and
John F. Meeder tracked the mangroves' westward retreat from the coastal Everglades. Now, their backs are to the wall - literally. Having reached the L-31E levee in southeast Miami-Dade County, there's nowhere left for mangroves in that part of the Everglades to flee. "You can see migration westward has stopped right where that levee is," Parkinson said. "In many cases there no space for them to migrate into - there's development or some feature that blocks their migration. They're done. That's it."
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Climate Change Threatens Marine Protected Areas
New research found that most marine life in Marine Protected Areas will not be able to tolerate warming ocean temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The study found that with continued 'business-as-usual' emissions, the protections currently in place won't matter, because by 2100, warming and reduced oxygen concentration will make Marine Protected Areas uninhabitable by most species currently residing in those areas. "There has been a lot of talk about establishing marine reserves to buy time while we figure out how to confront climate change," said Rich Aronson, ocean scientist at Florida Institute of Technology and a researcher on the study. "We're out of time, and the fact is we already know what to do: We have to control greenhouse gas emissions."
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Balancing Economic Benefits and Tropical Forest Conservation with Sustainable Logging
A
recently published paper in
Global Change Biology discusses how tropical forests provide critical ecosystem services for life on Earth including climate protection by storing large amounts of carbon.
Professor Jack Putz from the University of Florida, the senior collaborator on the study, pointed out major challenges for tropical forest management are identification of logging intensity thresholds and development of post-harvest treatments that are compatible with maintenance of ecosystem services. "Our study highlights the importance of remnant old-growth trees and the consequences of management intensification. Success at intensification may allow forest managers to meet societal needs for timber in smaller areas, albeit at the cost of other ecosystem services such as carbon and biodiversity in these areas. But intensification may also spare more pristine forests from disturbances associated with logging."
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New Interdisciplinary Research Initiative Will Help Predict How Environmental Change Will Shift Populations and Resources
Researchers from the University of Florida, Columbia University, and East Carolina University have been awarded a grant from the US Department of Defense for a project titled,
"Towards a Multi-Scale Theory on Coupled Human Mobility and Environmental Change." The project will be led by
Rachata Muneepeerakul from UF's Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. The results of this project will provide interested DoD entities an enhanced ability to anticipate and predict population movements resulting from environmental changes, including a development of a more effective migration early warning system. Such ability will help foster better logistical responses on the part of DoD to any given event or sets of events.
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The Invading Sea: An Editorial Collaboration to Urge Action on Sea-level Rise
The editorial boards of the South Florida Sun Sentinel, Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, along with WLRN Public Media are collaborating to address the threat South Florida faces from sea-level rise through a series of newspaper editorials, reports, roundtable discussions, and other community engagement events. Visit TheInvadingSea.com to learn more.
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Webinar: Sea Level Rise, Climate Change, and Water Resources Management in South Florida: Implications, Challenges, and Adaptation
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Available Now! A New Book from the FCI:
Florida's Climate: Changes, Variations, & Impacts
Florida's Climate: Changes, Variations, & Impacts provides a thorough review of the current state of research on Florida's climate, including physical climate benchmarks; climate prediction, projection, and attribution; and the impacts of climate and climate change on the people and natural resources in the state. The book is available for purchase in paperback and Kindle format at
Amazon.com. Individual chapters may be accessed on the
FCI website.
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Publications
FCI affiliates and/or authors from FCI member universities are in bold.
Angelini, C., van Montfrans, S. G., Hensel, M. J. S., He, Q., & Silliman, B. R. (2018). The importance of an underestimated grazer under climate change: how crab density, consumer competition, and physical stress affect salt marsh resilience. Oecologia, 187(1), 205-217.
Boone, W., Rysgaard, S., Carlson, D. F., Meire, L., Kirillov, S., Mortensen, J., et al. (2018). Coastal Freshening Prevents Fjord Bottom Water Renewal in Northeast Greenland: A Mooring Study From 2003 to 2015. Geophys. Res. Lett., 45(6), 2726-2733.
Bruno, J. F., Bates, A. E., Cacciapaglia, C., Pike, E. P., Amstrup, S. C., van Hooidonk, R., Henson, S. A., & Aronson, R. B. (2018). Climate change threatens the world's marine protected areas. Nature Climate Change, .
Kanter, D. R., Musumba, M., Wood, S. L. R., Palm, C., Antle, J., Balvanera, P., et al. (2018). Evaluating agricultural trade-offs in the age of sustainable development. Agricultural Systems, 163, 73-88.
McPhillips, L. E., Chang, H., Chester, M. V., ... Kominoski, J. S., et al. (2018). Defining Extreme Events: A Cross-Disciplinary Review. Earth's Future, 6(3), 441-455.
Rahman, M. H. ur, Ahmad, A., Wang, X., ... Shelia, V., ... & Hoogenboom, G. (2018). Multi-model projections of future climate and climate change impacts uncertainty assessment for cotton production in Pakistan. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 253-254, 94-113.
Ryan, S. F., Valella, P., Thivierge, G., Aardema, M. L., & Scriber, J. M. (2018). The role of latitudinal, genetic and temperature variation in the induction of diapause of Papilio glaucus (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae). Insect Science, 25(2), 328-336.
Santiago, L. S., De Guzman, M. E., Baraloto, C., Vogenberg, J. E., Brodie, M., Hérault, B., et al. (2018). Coordination and trade-offs among hydraulic safety, efficiency and drought avoidance traits in Amazonian rainforest canopy tree species. New Phytol, 218(3), 1015-1024.
Valencia, B. G., Bush, M. B., Coe, A. L., Orren, E., & Gosling, W. D. (2018). Polylepis woodland dynamics during the last 20,000 years. J Biogeogr, 45(5), 1019-1030.
Vyverberg, K., Dechnik, B., Dutton, A., Webster, J. M., Zwartz, D., & Portell, R. W. (2018). Episodic reef growth in the granitic Seychelles during the Last Interglacial: Implications for polar ice sheet dynamics. Marine Geology, 399, 170-187.
Wang, Y., Xu, Y., Spencer, R. G. M., Zito, P., Kellerman, A., Podgorski, D., et al. (2018). Selective Leaching of Dissolved Organic Matter From Alpine Permafrost Soils on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. J. Geophys. Res. Biogeosci., 123(3), 1005-1016.
Xie, S., Dixon, T. H., Voytenko, D., Deng, F., & Holland, D. M. (2018). Grounding line migration through the calving season at Jakobshavn Isbræ, Greenland, observed with terrestrial radar interferometry. The Cryosphere, 12(4), 1387-1400.
Zhang, J. A., Marks, F. D., Sippel, J. A., Rogers, R. F., Zhang, X., Gopalakrishnan, S. G., et al. (2018). Evaluating the Impact of Improvement in the Horizontal Diffusion Parameterization on Hurricane Prediction in the Operational Hurricane Weather Research and Forecast (HWRF) Model. Wea. Forecasting, 33(1), 317-329.
More >
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About Us
The Florida Climate Institute (FCI) is a multi-disciplinary network of national and international research and public organizations, scientists, and individuals concerned with achieving a better understanding of climate variability and change.
Email: info@floridaclimateinstitute.org
Website: floridaclimateinstitute.org
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