Climate change has been a reality for several decades and its effects are already measured in terms of biodiversity loss. Aware of this reality, the scientific community has been working for years with different types of climate models, sophisticated software simulations that evaluate the reaction of the climate to various influences. These models were precisely the central axis of a conference given this Thursday at the Toralla Marine Sciences Station, Ecimat, by Sara Varela, a graduate of the Faculty of Biology and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Museum für Naturken in Berlin.
During the conference, organized by the Marine Research Center, the researcher presented the Bioextremes y EcoClimate project. She focused, above all, on the climate models that exist to predict the climate, both past and future, and on the types of variables that these models offer, a presentation that served as a starting point for a subsequent debate with the researchers who attended the talk and who were able to exchange opinions on what types of climate layers could be built to improve the models and expand their usefulness.
According to the researcher, the predictions of temperature, precipitation, salinity, etc. produced by climate models allow the construction of ad-hoc variables to understand the consequences of climate change on biodiversity. In this regard, Varela emphasized that the BioExtremes project seeks to generate a new series of climate variables in GIS format related to the intensity and duration of extreme events -for example, number of consecutive days with temperatures below zero, or number of consecutive days with temperatures above 25º C-. With these variables, according to the researcher, it will be possible to program species distribution models to generate better maps on these issues in the future.
Seminar in June
The debate that opened in the Ecimat auditorium after the conference lasted about an hour. “It was a talk that aroused a lot of interest and, in fact, we agreed to hold a seminar next June to continue with the topic and establish contacts and projects for the future,” explained the Marine Research Center, highlighting the importance of “establishing contact with marine researchers, students or professionals in the marine sector to incorporate variables that may be of interest and establish new collaborations.”
Source: DUVI
