Loss of biodiversity
‘Climate change’ is such an all-encompassing phrase, that it’s easy to forget it will have a multitude of effects, which is why scientists at Imperial College London are looking more deeply at its impact on ecosystems. ‘We are going to have a climate change and we expect alongside that a loss of biodiversity,’ says Dr Pete Manning, who is leading the project along with Dr Sally Power.

At Imperial College’s Silwood Park campus researchers have constructed 168 rain shelters, each one covering a 2.4 m x 2.4 m plot of land. ‘We have a control treatment where the water falls on the roof,’ explains Manning ‘then it drops through holes onto the vegetation below. We have a climate change treatment where the water is gathered up and then we add back a proportion of the water according to a climate scenario, so every day we go out there and we reapply the water.’

Missing species
A recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that climate change will mean reduced summer rainfall in the UK, and higher winter rainfall. ‘That’s what we are trying to simulate,’ says Manning. ‘And we are doing that alongside different levels of plant biodiversity to see if certain species go missing from an ecosystem, and whether that makes the ecosystem more vulnerable to climate change.’

‘Conservation’ has been one of the main themes for environmentalists but Manning suggests that climate change means that the debate around ‘conservation’ is shifting. ‘People are starting to look at species conservation, not just in terms of saving species because they like them, but saving species because they are useful or they provide a service for the ecosystem’ explains Manning. In order to address the impact of climate change, generalized concern will need to give way to specific analyses and solutions.

Managing ecosystems
'This sort of research is helping to identify which species are performing which functions in an ecosystem, functions such as carbon cycling, water cycling and nutrient cycling,’ says Manning. ‘By working out which species may be important under which conditions you can then start to potentially value species and start thinking about how you might be able to manage ecosystems to preserve those that performed useful functions.’