Strategies in times of crisis – lessons from past marine ecosystems: virtual event. More about it HERE.

Climate change is projected to change the ecosystems on land and in the sea, and the rate of environmental change today has been unprecedented for millions of years.

Experiments assessing the impacts on marine ecosystems are unlike the real world – they are often limited to a select few species and drivers of environmental change, and hence cannot represent the complexity of interactions in ‘real’ ecosystems. The fossil record is an archive of responses to climate change at a global ecosystem scale, where the sensitivities of species (or higher taxa) to a specific environmental driver can be determined.

Professor Schmidt will explore historical and geological records of the response of marine ecosystems to environmental change, and the talk will give examples of the information that palaeontologists can contribute to the global challenge of estimating the impacts of climate change.