Thirty years ago, biologists began to predict how climate change would alter species'
ranges, extinctions, and their roles in ecosystems (1). Since then, evidence has begun to …

Environmental scientists are increasingly concerned not only with explaining the present,
but with antici-pating the future. An understanding of the past is vital to both concerns …

Ecosystems change in response to factors such as climate variability, invasions, and
wildfires. Most records used to assess such change are based on short-term ecological data …

Predicting the future ecological impact of global change drivers requires understanding how
these same drivers have acted in the past to produce the plant populations and communities …

Understanding how species and ecosystems respond to climate change requires spatially
and temporally rich data for a diverse set of species and habitats, combined with models that …

Historical data sets can be useful tools to aid in understanding the impacts of global change
on natural ecosystems. Resampling of historically sampled sites (“snapshot resampling”) …

In order to answer important questions about ecosystems and biodiversity, scientists can
look to the past geological recordâ€" which includes fossils, sediment and ice cores, and …

Montane species worldwide are shifting upslope in response to recent temperature
increases. These upslope shifts are predicted to lead to mountaintop extinctions of species …

The Ministerial Declaration made at the World Summit on Sustainable De-velopment in
Johannesburg agreed to protection and restoration of the integrity of our planet's ecological …

To understand ecosystem responses to anthropogenic global change, a prevailing
framework is the definition of threshold levels of pressure, above which response …