Prof. Jens-Christian Svenning talk on Long-term biodiversity-climate disequilibria – a macroecological perspective

The host this time is Research Area 8 – Biodiversity and climate Long-term biodiversity-climate disequilibria – a macroecological perspective Speaker: Prof. Jens-Christian Svenning, VILLUM Investigator, Carlsberg Foundation “Semper Ardens” Researcher, Ecoinformatics & Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Denmark Time: December 4 at 13h00 Place: Ahlmannsalen Earth’s climate has varied dramatically in the past, within ongoing cooling during the last 30 million and strong glacial-interglacial oscillations across the Quaternary (last 2.6 million years) having had strong impacts on biodiversity, e.g., regional extinctions and range shifts. A key question is whether species distributions and local species diversity (s.l.) have been able to track these changes to remain in equilibrium in climate or, if not, how widespread across space and time disequilibrium dynamics have been. Our macroecological work show that long-term (10^4 year or more) climatic disequilibria are widespread across regions and organism groups not only in species distributions and richness, but also sometimes penetrating to functional diversity and ecosystem functioning. These results suggest that we must expect strongly disequilibrial diversity responses to ongoing and future anthropogenic climate change.