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| B7 - Landscape-level Experiments and Climate Change | ||||||||||||||||
| Date: | Wednesday (2009-04-15) | |||||||||||||||
| Time: | 10:20 AM - 12:00 PM | |||||||||||||||
| Room: | Ball Room 3 | |||||||||||||||
| Session Chair(s): | Diane M. Debinski | |||||||||||||||
| Session Abstract: Most observational studies of climate change are conducted at large geographic scales along elevation or latitudinal gradients. In contrast, experimental studies of climate change are often conducted at very fine geographic scales within relatively homogenous habitat types. These scale and homogeneity constraints restrict our understanding of how climate change may manifest itself across a heterogeneous landscape. There is a need for landscape–level approaches to using experimental data that will allow us to understand how changing temperature and precipitation will affect ecological communities. Field experiments, in contrast to laboratory experiments or models, allow scientist to monitor ecosystem responses to directly manipulated climate conditions in a natural setting. These experiments are usually conducted at a scale appropriate for the structure of the plant community being examined (i.e., tens of square meters for grasslands versus hundreds of square meters for forests), but they are often small in scale from the perspective of vagile organisms that may inhabit these locations. Manipulating ecosystems at the landscape rather than the patch scale, however, becomes much more challenging in terms of both cost and logistics. Here, we discuss the challenges of conducting landscape-scale studies of climate change on ecological communities and examine approaches for scaling up experimental studies to the landscape level. | ||||||||||||||||
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