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Botany and a changing world: Introduction to the Special Issue on Global Biological Change
Author(s) -
Weller Stephen G.,
Suding Katharine,
Sakai Ann K.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
american journal of botany
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.218
H-Index - 151
eISSN - 1537-2197
pISSN - 0002-9122
DOI - 10.3732/ajb.1300198
Subject(s) - global change , biology , ecology , environmental change , psychological resilience , ecosystem , resilience (materials science) , climate change , perspective (graphical) , environmental resource management , computer science , environmental science , psychology , physics , artificial intelligence , psychotherapist , thermodynamics
• The impacts of global change have heightened the need to understand how organisms respond to and influence these changes. Can we forecast how change at the global scale may lead to biological change? Can we identify systems, processes, and organisms that are most vulnerable to global changes? Can we use this understanding to enhance resilience to global changes? This special issue on global biological change emphasizes the integration of botanical information at different biological levels to gain perspective on the direct and indirect effects of global change. Contributions span a range of spatial scales and include both ecological and evolutionary timescales and highlight work across levels of organization, including cellular and physiological processes, individuals, populations, and ecosystems. Integrative botanical approaches to global change are critical for the ecological and evolutionary insights they provide and for the implications these studies have for species conservation and ecosystem management.