Impacts on biodiversity

Science Daily: Global climate change will not only impact plants and animals but will also affect bacteria, fungi and other microbial populations that perform a myriad of functions important to life on earth. It is not entirely certain what those effects will be, but they could be significant and will probably not be good, say researchers June 3 at a scientific meeting in Boston. "Microbes perform a number of critical functions for ecosystems around the world and we are only starting to understand the impact that global change is having on them," says Kathleen Treseder of the University of California, Irvine, at the 108th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

Treseder studied the effect of rising temperatures and fungi on carbon stores in Alaskan boreal forests, one area of the globe that is experiencing greater warming than others. "There is a lot of frozen dead material under the snowpack. There is as much carbon trapped in the soil of northern ecosystems as there is carbon in the atmosphere. It is a big unknown what is going to happen if these environments heat up," says Treseder…

Microbial growth on a blood agar plate without any procedure (sector A), after washing hands (sector B), and after disinfecting hands with alcohol (sector C), photo by Pöllö, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2