New research shows the impact of climate change on forests is to “scramble the biological clock of the forest floor“. The study shows how the change in timing of various events disconnects flowering plants, for example, from the activity of insects.
Warmer temperatures and altered precipitation patterns are expected to continue to occur as the climate changes. How these changes will impact the flowering phenology of herbaceous perennials in northern forests is poorly understood but could have consequences for forest functioning and species interactions.
It’s rare to find a study that shows this. Most science makes linear assumptions about climate change impacts, e.g. that they will result in the decline or increase in a species’ population. In fact, the effect is to increase in some places and decrease in others.
EcosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More are entropy-based. Pristine ecosystems have maximised entropy productionWhere an ecosystem achieves a steady stable-state with the maximum possible number of species and there is very little free surplus energy because it is all consumed inside biological processes. Entropy dictates that all matter moves towards chaos but animal life enables ecosystems to continually move in the opposite direction. Reaching a state of maximum entropy production is essential for More … that’s like saying, everything follows a predictable pattern, like a smooth curve. You can predict where on the curve to arrive, based on “instinct” that is partly genetic and partly learned. You know what happens when availability of toilet paper became less predictable during the pandemic? That’s an example of increased entropyThe degree of disorder or chaos in a system, most often used to describe thermodynamic energy but also used the behaviour of information. All else being equal, physics determines that all matter and energy moves towards chaos, therefore biological systems are in a continual state of battling against entropic forces in order to remain stable. The most stable ecosystem is More. It causes a break in normal patterns. The panic buying is chaotic as it is erratic and patchy. You could say it causes a breakdown of “information entropy”.
Climate change introduces free surplus energyThe energy of a system that is emitted as waste and is not part of ecosystem processes. There is always some free surplus energy as this creates the basis for evolution where new species exploit gaps in the ecosystem where free energy becomes available. Surplus energy can occur as a result of disruption or disturbance. When free surplus energy reaches More into systems. This means more entropy and therefore, more perturbations in the curve, so the behaviour of all animals and plants, becomes more chaotic. Animals don’t panic-buy, they follow instinct … but the outcomes are the same. It’s more likely they will plot a course to a location and miss altogether. This could be the time of year a plant fruits, or the movement of a migratory prey animal. As the environment’s entropy increases, things become less predictable and the system destabilises as things can’t find enough energyEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More where they expect to*.
This same process also happens when you kill animals. The energy they would have consumed and locked inside their lifecycles and everything connected to them, is emitted as positive entropy and it destabilises ecosystems. As all animals are carbon-based, climate change is coupled to the mass extinctionAnimal life hasn't existed for very long on planet Earth. In the last 500 million years, there have been five mass extinctions, defined as events that wiped out at least 75% of animal life. The Devonian mass extinction is considered to have been caused by the rise of plants on land, which polluted the oceans in the absence of animals. More of animals.
What this paper teaches us, is we must start thinking in terms of stability and chaos(Of energy and ecosystems). Ecosystems are thermodynamically driven. Disorder occurs when energy dissipates and becomes more chaotic. For example, the release of hot air into the atmosphere results in that energy is freer to disperse (maximum entropy). The opposite is true when energy is locked into biological processes, when it is stored inside molecules (minimum entropy). Stability in ecosystems occurs More. It’s the breakdown of the wildlife structures (the “animal impact”) that changes the fabric on which we depend for our own life support.
*The amount of energy has remained the same, it’s just become redistributed.
