Communicating about Ecological Thresholds

To hire Ariane de Bremond as staff to assist with the Heinz Center's Global Change Program, focusing on protected area management and ecological thresholds as they pertain to adaptations to climate change. Ariane will focus, in particular, on the Heinz Center's effort to evaluate and communicate the state of the science concerning ecological thresholds of ecosystems in responding to global change, particularly climate change. Thresholds may result in dramatic and rapid shifts in ecosystem viability. Examples of non-climate-related shifts include responses of fish populations to overfishing, or the impacts of harvesting practices on some tropical forests. The project goal is to research case studies where these threshold shifts are already taking place and to learn from these ecosystem shifts. By analyzing these responses, they can be better able to predict climate-related ecosystem shifts, such as is already being seen in increases in wildfires in Alaska, western Canada, and Siberia. The key activity of the project will be to convene a Symposium with a variety of stakeholders particularly involved in protected areas and parks so that they can assess how to adapt. The Symposium will be participatory, but will also generate a published volume of the case studies and policy briefs and extend what is known about the non-linear responses of ecosystems to major disturbances. Ariane's work will focus on developing the case studies that illustrate which global change impacts will affect ecosystems and the human and ecological implications of these changes. The Symposium will help generate collaborations for further action to identify priority goals, especially among land managers, in an effort to influence decision-makers.