Climate Change Will Unbalance Ecosystems

Climate change over the next 50 years will throw delicate ecosystems off balance, reduce the geographical range of many species and bring new predators and prey together, scientists said on Wednesday.

Fewer species than expected will become extinct but their distribution could be radically different in the years to come, which will have unpredictable results for humans. “This is important because the modifications affecting our climate are like a big experiment the world is doing without knowing what’s going to happen,” said A. Townsend Peterson, of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center. Townsend and his Kansas colleagues and scientists in Mexico and California produced a new model of climate change based on an analysis of its impact on more than 1,800 species of mammals, birds and butterflies in Mexico.

The research, reported in the science journal Nature, could offer new insights and guidance to conservationists and policy makers. The scientists used computer simulations to calculate how climate change will impact on individual species and where they will be likely to survive in the next half century.

“Deleting a species here and there will produce effects of unknown properties. We don’t know what will happen when you delete five percent of the species and we were finding as high as 40 percent of species removed at times,” Townsend said in a telephone interview. “That is a scary result.” The scientists studied species in Mexico because of its biodiversity. The most worrying result was the reshuffling of ecological communities-species that live together. Townsend said each species shows an individual response to climate change which is complicated and that the rearrangement of ecological communities may be more serious than expected.

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气候变化将破坏生态平衡
 
科学家在星期三指出，未来50年的气候变化将会使脆弱的生态系统失衡，减少许多物种的生存区域，并导致新的食肉动物和其猎物共存一处。

尽管在未来的数年中濒临灭绝的物种没有预期之多，但是它们分布将和现在大相径庭，人类无法预测其后果。堪萨斯大学自然历史博物馆和生物多样研究中心(University of Kansas Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center)的A. 汤森•彼德森(Townsend Peterson)说，“这很重要，因为会影响我们气候的种种改变就如同世界正在进行一项重大实验，却不知道会发生什么。” 汤森得和他的堪萨斯同事以及墨西哥和加利福尼亚的科学家就气候变化对墨西哥的1800多种哺乳动物、鸟类和蝴蝶的影响进行分析后，制作了一种新型气候变化模型。

据科学期刊《自然》报道，这一研究能给自然资源保护者和政策制定者提供全新的深入的认识和指导。科学家用计算机模拟来计算气候变化如何影响单个物种以及下半个世纪它们可能的生存空间。在一次电话采访中，汤森说，“如果到处灭绝物种，会出现其性质难以预料的后果。如果物种减少5%，我们不知道会发生什么。我们曾发现，有时居然有40%的物种消失了。这样的结果太可怕了。”科学家选择对墨西哥的物种进行研究，是因为那里的生物具有多样性。最令人担心的结果是生态群落—居住在一起的物种—的重组。汤森还说，每一种物种都对复杂的气候变化有各自不同的反应，生物群落的重新组合要比想象的严重的多。

但愿这个可以看啊

hao

up

十分感谢～

thank u so much