Climate change is making our environment 'bluer'

Science Daily: The "colour" of our environment is becoming "bluer," a change that could have important implications for animals' risk of becoming extinct, ecologists have found. In a major study involving thousands of data points and published recently in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Animal Ecology, researchers examined how quickly or slowly animal populations and their environment change over time, something ecologists describe using "spectral colour."

Ecologists have investigated the link between fluctuations in the environment and those of animal populations for the past 30 years. They describe fluctuations as a colour spectrum, where red signifies an environment or population that fluctuates more slowly over time (such as ocean temperature) and blue signifies more rapid fluctuations (such as changes in air temperature).

Existing models and theories suggest that the spectral colour of the environment should affect the spectral colour of animal populations. Now for the first time ecologists have assembled field data to confirm the theory.

Bernardo Garcia-Carreras and Dr Daniel Reuman of Imperial College London examined three large sets of data. They used the Global Population Dynamics Database, from which they extracted data on changes in population for 147 species of bird, mammal, insect, fish and crustacean over the past 30 years, and two sets of temperature data from the Climatic Research Unit and the Global Historical Climatology Network. The latter includes data collected from weather stations worldwide throughout the twentieth century.

The study not only confirmed that the colour of changes in the environment map onto the colour of changes in animal populations, but found that our environment is becoming "bluer," in other words fluctuating more rapidly over time….

A blue transition by Wilinckx at nl.wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license