NCKU professor’s research on climatic variability published in Science
NCKU Press Center
[Tainan, Taiwan, March 25, 2016]
Climate variability increases with global warming but very little is known about how species adapt to it. National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) professor Dr. I-Ching Chen working with scientists from Academia Sinica proposed that long-term and short-term climatic variabilities affect species in opposite ways.
This finding challenged the classic ecological hypothesis to provide a clear roadmap to understand how species adapt to climatic variabilities, Chen reported at a press conference Friday.
The research was published in the journal Science on March 24, 2016.
This study challenged a well-known macrophysiological rule－Climatic Variability Hypothesis (CVH), which suggests that greater variability selects for organisms with broader tolerances, enabling them to be geographically widespread.
“We bring a novel perspective that temporal scale actually matters and short-term climatic variability favors physiological specialist,” said Chen.
She noted, “In fact, short term variability, such as daily temperature range (DTR), dominants the majority of the earth surface but the ecological implication has seldom been discussed. It’s very likely that there are more specialist species than we expected and they are particularly vulnerable to climate change.”
