Recent climate-driven ecological change in Australia

Over the past century, land surface temperatures have risen by almost 1 °C across the Australian continent. However, the ecological impacts of this change have not been systematically investigated.

Rapid climate change poses significant new challenges for natural resource managers. The ability to successfully maintain the health and persistence of Australia’s biodiversity is dependent on an evolving body of knowledge about the ecological impacts of climate change.

In order to develop a more explicit understanding of the link between climate and ecosystem responses, CSIRO and the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water are collaborating to examine how and where climate change has influenced Australian patterns of biodiversity over the past 100 years.

The three-year project will investigate the nature of recent climate-driven ecological responses by synthesising the scientific evidence, collecting anecdotal observations, and modelling historical time series climate, biological and environmental data.

More detail is available in the project flier.

Project publications

Journal papers

Prober SM, Raisbeck-Brown N, Porter NB, Williams KJ, Leviston Z, Dickson F (2019) Recent climate-driven ecological change across a continent as perceived through local ecological knowledge. PLoS ONE 14(11): e0224625. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224625.

Conference presentations

Prober SM, Raisbeck-Brown N, Porter N, Williams K, Leviston Z, Dickson F (2019) People’s perceptions of recent climate-driven ecological change in Australia. Ecological Society of Australia Annual conference, 25-29 November 2019, Launceston, Tasmania.

Raisbeck-Brown N, Prober SM, Porter NB, Leviston Z, Norman E, Williams KJ, Dickson F (2018) Recent ecological change in Australia: are people perceiving climate-related changes in their local biodiversity and ecosystems? Ecosystem Surprises & Rapid Collapse; 8-9 May 2018; Canberra. Boden Research Conference Australian Academy of Science

Data

Prober, Suzanne; Raisbeck-Brown, Nat; Porter, Natasha; Williams, Kristen; Leviston, Zoe; Dickson, Fiona (2019): Recent ecological change in Australia survey 2017. v2. CSIRO. Data Collection. https://doi.org/10.25919/5dbba9661087a.

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