Talk:Effects of climate change on ecosystems

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Oceans and Fresh Water[edit]

I've added two sections, Oceans and Fresh Water. Oceans discusses the effects of ocean acidification and deoxygenation, while Fresh Water discusses the effects on seasonal rainfall and watershed, as well as the effects on species of salmon and other fresh water animals / organisms.

If you have anything to add or any ideas to further enhance these two sections, please let me know and feel free to update anything. There is plenty more to add.

Agriculture[edit]

Regarding this deletion, I think WP:SUMMARY and WP:COMPREHENSIVE support some overlap in articles of overlapping scope, and the deleted text certainly includes reference to symbiotic interactions which pertain more to ecosystems than agriculture. 07:09, 22 February 2013 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Neo Poz (talk • contribs)

I've restored your edit. As I said in my edit summary, one of concerns I have is that your edit is a copy from another article. I agree that some of the information may be relevant to this article. In my opinion, however, your edit should be revised to reflect this. Another concern I have is the focus on North American impacts. In my view, the article should describe global impacts. Compare with [1][2][3][4]. Because of my concerns, I've added some templates to the article.
Compared to your addition, I think that the rest of the article attempts to take a global perspective, and is written to be clearly relevant to the article's subject. For these reasons, I've moved your edit to the bottom of the article. Enescot (talk) 06:07, 26 February 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thank you! I hope I will be able to make those improvements soon. It is such a pleasure to be able to work through sometimes esoteric details like this. Neo Poz (talk) 06:09, 26 February 2013 (UTC)Reply[reply]

External links modified[edit]

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Old Info[edit]

"The United States forest service predicts that between 2011 and 2013 virtually all 5 million acres (20,000 km2) of Colorado’s lodgepole pine trees over five inches (127 mm) in diameter will be lost."

I think that's a bit old. Maybe replace it? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.5.0.167 (talk) 13:37, 14 April 2016 (UTC)Reply[reply]

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Citations[edit]

Hello @Alyssa Schultz:

Glad to see you are improving this important article. I don't know if you know but when you add a cite with the Visual Editor there is a "Re-use" tab on the right. So you may find it useful to re-use the IPCC Special Reports Summary for Policymakers (the first 2 cites in the article). Doing cites can be fiddly so any questions please ask. Chidgk1 (talk) 12:10, 22 April 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Added Images[edit]

I added some new images to the sections species adaptations and coral bleaching. Feel free to let me know or change anything if needed. Gdossantos (talk) 13:51, 3 December 2021 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Couet[edit]

Hello @Emma Marjakangas: While Chen is a very well regarded paper your own is so recent it lacks citations. Additionally please see WP:CITESELF. I suggest removing your own paper until it is more seriously regarded. Invasive Spices (talk) 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: CMN2160B[edit]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 12 January 2022 and 22 April 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Issachar Gebreyes (article contribs).

Overlap with effects of climate change[edit]

Some sections of this article overlap a lot with effects of climate change and its sub-articles. E.g. the whole section on oceans overlaps 100% with effects of climate change on oceans. I suggest to rename this article to effects of climate change on ecosystems and then to rework it to reduce overlap with the other articles in the suite of "effects of climate change on...". EMsmile (talk) 08:32, 22 April 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

  • Support The effects of ecosystems on climate change are not very well understood yet as far as I know, and I guess very small compared to fossil fuels. Chidgk1 (talk) 15:12, 24 April 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thanks. Further opinions by previous editors? Enescot, Mr.nosilrub, Alyssa Schultz, Nuikoech, אלכסנדר סעודה, Mottezen, RCraig09 (the first 4 no longer seem active). EMsmile (talk) 18:39, 25 April 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
@EMsmile I made the move on the article, to make to make it more consistent per the naming concerns, let me know if you need additional admin support, Sadads (talk) 14:25, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

But what with the mitigation potential of ecosystems? I think that this should take as much place here as the effects. This is one of the problem that climate change with other factors hurts ecosystems what reduce their mitigation potential what creates fedback effect. I think that the page should be linked both to the page Effects of climate change and to the page Climate change mitigation as to the redirects Climate tipping point, Runaway climate change.

The change that should be done in the page in my opinion is to include all this in it so people will understand.

--Alexander Sauda/אלכסנדר סעודה (talk) 08:55, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Well in that case, the article should be split in two. Most of its content currently is about effects of climate change on oceans, isn't it? In fact all of it about the effects. The other content would be at Climate change mitigation, see here this section on carbon sinks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_mitigation#Carbon_sinks_and_removal EMsmile (talk) 12:37, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Compare with the two articles that were created from the formerly called single article on climate change and agriculture: now split into effects of climate change on agriculture and Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Then there's also climate-smart agriculture. EMsmile (talk) 12:39, 26 April 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Removed unsourced content about wildfires[edit]

I have removed this section because it was unsourced and also because it would overlap with the content already available at wildfire, which is the main place where this kind of content should reside (we have linked to it now): "In 2019 unusually hot and dry weather in parts of the northern hemisphere caused massive wildfires, from the Mediterranean to – in particular – the Arctic. Climate change, by rising temperatures and shifts in precipitation patterns, is amplifying the risk of wildfires and prolonging their season. The northern part of the world is warming faster than the planet on average. The average June temperature in the parts of Siberia, where wildfires are raging, was almost ten degrees higher than the 1981–2010 average. Temperatures in Alaska reach record highs of up to 90 °F (32 °C) on 4 July, fuelling fires in the state, including along the Arctic Circle.

In addition to the direct threat from burning, wildfires cause air pollution, that can be carried over long distances, affecting air quality in far away regions. Wildfires also release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. For example, the 2014 megafires in Canada burned more than 7 million acres of forest, releasing more than 103 million tonnes of carbon – half as much as all the plants in Canada typically absorb in an entire year.


Wildfires are common in the northern hemisphere between May and October, but the latitude, intensity, and the length of the fires, were particularly unusual. In June 2019, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) has tracked over 100 intense and long-lived wildfires in the Arctic. In June alone, they emitted 50 megatones of carbon dioxide - equivalent to Sweden's annual GHG emissions. This is more than was released by Arctic fires in the same month in the years 2010 - 2018 combined. The fires have been most severe in Alaska and Siberia, where some cover territory equal to almost 100 000 football pitches. In Alberta, one fire was bigger than 300 000 pitches. In Alaska alone, CAMS has registered almost 400 wildfires this year, with new ones igniting every day. In Canada, smoke from massive wildfires near Ontario are producing large amounts of air pollution. The heat wave in Europe also caused wildfires in a number of countries, including Germany, Greece and Spain. The heat is drying forests and making them more susceptible to wildfires. Boreal forests are now burning at a rate unseen in at least 10,000 years." EMsmile (talk) 09:14, 22 April 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Wiki Education assignment: Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2022[edit]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 10 January 2022 and 23 April 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Raizach (article contribs).

Wiki Education assignment: Plant Ecology Winter 2023[edit]

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— Assignment last updated by Dracaena trifasciata (talk) 22:16, 24 February 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Plans for future changes?[edit]

Hi User:InformationToKnowledge we discussed on another talk page somewhere what you suggested to do with this article but I can't remember where. Could you please copy this information across, so that future page watchers know about your suggestions for changes? Even if you don't have time to make them yourself in the near future, it would still be useful to have them outlined here. I know e.g. that User:ASRASR is planning to do some improvements of this article in the next two months. Thanks. EMsmile (talk) 19:56, 11 July 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Hi EMsmile, and I hope to hear from @ASRASR as well!
Essentially, my issue with this article is that it's far too focused on forests, with little to nothing about the rest. However, I soon found that the term ecosystem is so broad there is no specific list of ecosystems on Wikipedia.
However, there is a list of biomes, and so my hope is to rename this article to have biomes instead of ecosystems in its title. It would then provide summary-style coverage of how climate change affects what we can call the primary biomes - i.e. two types of grassland, two-three types of forest (tropical, boreal and temperate), mountain habitats, wetlands, deserts and presumably an excerpt on oceans and an entry on freshwater ecosystems. I believe this version of the article would be far more useful than what we have now. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:14, 13 July 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Hi again InformationToKnowledge, I saw your note in June but I am not really sure if "biomes" in the title would work much better. It is somehow less easily understood by laypersons, I would say.
In addition, I noticed that effects of climate change on biodiversity redirects to here. Would this perhaps be the better title? I also noticed the article effects of climate change on plant biodiversity. What do we do with that one? Merge? Pinging User:ASRASR again. EMsmile (talk) 09:01, 6 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Hi! I mean, the main goal is for the article to be understandable, which is really difficult when the current name seems to inherently lead to only weak definitions and unclear scope for including information, resulting in arbitrary structure and decisions on what does and does not deserve coverage. (and "effects of climate change on biodiversity" will almost certainly suffer from the same; arguably, nearly all of the content implied by that name is better served in extinction risk from climate change.) I didn't notice it as much before, when the outstandingly poor "terrestrial animals" article was still around, but now that it's finally split apart, the issues in this one become far more glaring. Don't know when I will have time to put more plan into practice - hopefully sooner rather than later.
If your concern is that the word "biome" is currently unfamiliar to most, then the mere fact of exposure to it should address that soon enough - if history is any guide, a lot faster than might be expected. You may or may not remember how at the very outset of the pandemic, some argued that referring to the disease with a cold acronym like COVID-19 will never catch on. About a year later, some have made the same argument about replacing geographical references for variants with Greek letters. Both concerns ended up completely baseless.
Finally, I think I have already mentioned that my plan for the "plant biodiversity" article was to create a "decline of plant biodiversity" article at the same time I finish creating the equivalent articles for reptiles and birds (and rescue the mammal draft we have already discussed before), then merge that article name there. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 15:20, 6 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I vaguely understand your plan but not fully. Could you please spell out the plan of attack with a short bullet point list, i.e. what is your recommendation to do with Effects of climate change on ecosystems and Effects of climate change on plant biodiversity, and in which order? They would both be merged into extinction risk from climate change, did I understand that correctly? And separately you want to create a Decline in plant biodiversity article? EMsmile (talk) 21:16, 6 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
...No, this isn't what I meant. I suppose I'll simply present what I would really like to be a replacement article for this one.
Effects of climate change on biomes
By now, I think that most of the worthwhile content from this article has been moved by me to either this new article, or to extinction risk from climate change earlier on. This does not mean that a merge of this article would necessarily be imminent, since there are still a few things to address: the new article above could clearly be improved (only two paragraphs in the lead, some biomes like wetlands clearly need more representation, etc.) and now that I have more options, I'll have to re-evaluate if the "Impacts of species degradation due to climate change on livelihoods" (such an awkward title!) which I had originally moved to the extinction risk article would be more at home there, or in the biome article, after rewriting.
I am also not yet sure in regards to the merge destination. It could be this new biome article, but it could also be somewhere else, like a section in the ecosystem article itself, or even in ecosystem collapse (where I had finally completed that merge I proposed months earlier!).
And Decline in plant biodiversity would be using whatever parts of Effects of climate change on plant biodiversity are still relevant as the basis for much of it, while combining it with information on non-climate drivers. This is the same approach as what I want to do to convert climate change and birds into Decline in bird populations, down the line. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 17:37, 8 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I don't quite understand the process that you used: Here in this edit summary you said that this is content that was moved from Effects of climate change on ecosystems and yet when I check in the edit history of Effects of climate change on ecosystems I see nothing moved out. So does that mean you copied content rather than moving it? I think moving would be better, so that Effects of climate change on ecosystems shrinks, the more you move the content around. Otherwise you end up with identical content in two articles which is confusing? EMsmile (talk) 20:50, 8 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Regarding the ecosystem article: I had worked on it a lot about 2 years ago (have taken it off my watchlist some time ago after that). It's a high level article. It does mention climate change impacts here and there but it would be good to revisit it and to either move existing content to there (as you suggested) or to work with excerpts or better wikilinking. EMsmile (talk) 20:50, 8 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
And if the plan is to merge this entire article soon enough (which we both seem to be in agreement on), then does it really matter if some content is not removed from here before it's added to another article? InformationToKnowledge (talk) 12:24, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

OK, Yes with geologic eras I meant pre-history, i.e. millions of years ago... Does this need to be indicated in the title perhaps? We could make is something like Decline in plant biodiversity since 1850, analogue to retreat of glaciers since 1850 or Decline in plant biodiversity from human activity? And yes, I do think it's important to actullay "move" / cut and paste content in the same sweep of editing (rather than to copy), unless the merger really is imminent. That's because you just never know what happens: you might be run over by a bus and unable to finish the work, someone else might swoop in in the meantime etc. So better to always leave a "clean" trail behind, is my opinion. EMsmile (talk) 12:51, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I really do not think that proposal is a good idea. By the same token, every single climate change article would have to have "anthropogenic" or "since 1850" stuck onto its title somewhere. Sometimes, we just have to assume common sense from our readers. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 13:51, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
For that matter: wouldn't renaming biodiversity loss in one of these two proposed ways then be the first place to start? Again, at this point, the people who are interested enough to read about the subject would have an intuitive understanding of what period is implied. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 14:02, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Well can we at least ensure that the timeframe that is implied is very visible in the first paragraph of the lead, ideally already in the first sentence? And also in the short description that is above the lead? While looking around at the various "decline in XX" articles (like decline of insect populations I get more and more confused which time period we are actually talking about. I find it interesting that we have retreat of glaciers since 1850 instead of just retreat of glaciers. We did have a somewhat related discussion about this at sea level rise where someone pointed out the title should be more explicit. But OK, leave the titles as they are, but commit to making clear which time period we are talking about as early in the lead as possible? Good compromise? EMsmile (talk) 14:32, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Earlier discussion about merging to biodiversity loss[edit]

I might have asked you this question before but do you see the new Decline in plant biodiversity to become a sub-article to biodiversity loss, which in itself is a sub-article to biodiversity? And do we really need it? Could it not be part of biodiversity loss? And would it cover all geologic time spans or only the current time (since industralisation perhaps)? I would find it better if it was targeted to just the time since industrialisation, or alternatively just during the anthropocene, i.e. since the 1950s. EMsmile (talk) 20:50, 8 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Yes, you did ask me this question before, in July. I have answered it back then, and I do not see any need to change my answer now. And considering that effects of climate change on plant biodiversity, which will be used as the basis, is only 2648 words long, there would most likely be enough space for the most notable preindustrial examples as well (but not pre-humanity, if that's what you mean by "geological eras", since the vast majority of plant species have only evolved relatively recently:see flowering plant for context), although it ultimately depends on what the WP:RS are going to support.
Regarding that earlier discussion from July about biodiversity loss I see now that you said the main issue is lack of space. The biodiversity loss article is now: 46 kB (7005 words) "readable prose size". This means there is about 15 kB of space left (up to 60 kB in total is quite OK). I think there is probably quite some potential to trim and condense the existing text of biodiversity loss. The article Effects of climate change on plant biodiversity is actually rather small at 17 kB (2648 words) "readable prose size". So I think it could work, size-wise. The advantage of putting it in with the biodiversity loss article is that it has a higher likelihood of actually being read by people. I would vouch for merging it in first, then if needed creating a spin-off article later. But if not, I guess we can bring it back together by using an excerpt from the lead of the new "Decline in plant biodiversity" article. EMsmile (talk) 12:58, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
The issue is that a) that metric does not count the excerpts (plant biodiversity one easily adds ~500 words to that, and all the excerpts altogether are something like 1.5-2k words) and b) it's not just plants that are underrepresented, but the other kingdoms too. "Observations by type of life" is completely silent on mammals and reptiles right now, and there's effectively no content from decline in amphibian populations anywhere in the article.
Trying to describe all of that as a single article will very obviously balloon it to ridiculous size, and that is even while trying to deal with just the current, still rather limited, extent of research. There will only be more and more research on this in the future, for every kingdom of life, so making separate articles now is entirely prudent. InformationToKnowledge (talk) 13:48, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I see your point about length and details but what I try to avoid is that we spend a lot of brainpower on improving those sub-sub-articles, but the sub-article (in this case biodiversity loss) lingers as an unimproved article even though it gets the higher pageviews than the sub-sub-articles. E.g. what speaks against already now improving the section about plant biodiversity loss in the biodiversity loss article, rather than waiting until the sub-sub-article has been created? Is it possible that you find it more enjoyable/satisfying to create new articles than to rework existing (higher level) articles? If that was so, I could totally understand it and it's entirely your choice where you put your efforts. But the higher level articles get the higher pageviews so they are more important in my opinion. :-) EMsmile (talk) 14:37, 9 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Well, sooner or later, the relevant sections would have to be summmaries of sub-articles, and it is simply going to be easier to do that once, well, there's an article to summarize in the first place. Without that, I feel it'll be a lot harder to get a bearing on what to include and what not to when working with the existing limits of the article.
I think my recent work on effects of climate change on agriculture alone should dispel the view that I tend to neglect the higher-level articles, no? InformationToKnowledge (talk) 11:42, 10 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I appreciate all your work immensely, don't get me wrong. But effects of climate change on agriculture is not really a higher level articles in my opinion (just look at its low pageviews). Agriculture would be one or biodiversity. But yes, summarising a very detailed article later in a higher level article might be a good plan. EMsmile (talk) 17:38, 13 October 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Wiki Education assignment: BISC 2 Genetics, Ecology, and Evolution[edit]

This article is currently the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 August 2023 and 15 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): 20carnesa (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Alv5269, Aideng427.

— Assignment last updated by Alv5269 (talk) 23:47, 12 November 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

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