How much will strawberry harvests shrink when extreme heat harms pollinators?
How much will strawberry harvests shrink when extreme heat harms pollinators? How much will timber production decline when windstorms flatten forests? How much will recreational value disappear when large wildfires sweep through Colorado’s mountain towns?
These are some critical questions that a new computer simulation, co-developed by a CU Boulder ecologist, can answer. In a paper published March 5 in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers presented a model that aims to understand how extreme weather events, worsened by climate change, will affect ecosystems and the benefits they provide to humans.
Based on the model, a Minnesota forest could lose up to 50% of its timber revenue if a severe windstorm hits.
“With climate change, there’s an urgent need to incorporate the impacts of extreme events like mega-fires and hurricanes have on the benefits nature provides,” said Laura Dee, the paper’s first author and associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “This research is an important step toward anticipating impacts to ecosystem services so that we can adapt management strategies accordingly.”
Read More at: University of Colorado Boulder
Photo Credit: adamneil via Pixabay
