Ecosystem Responses to Global Climate Change: Moving Beyond Color Mapping

Abstract

T he scientific community has worked feverishly for most of the last two decades to offer quantitative insight into the fate of species and ecosystems faced with the changing climate that is expected to result from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). These assessments are usually done by (a) using simulation analyses that couple largescale models of climate forcing (general circulation models, or GCMs) with process-based ecophysiological and biogeochemical models