Director of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, England launches key text on climate change.

June 2011

Trevor Hodkinson, Director of Royal Botanic Gardens Kew - Steve Hopper and John Parnell at the launch of a text on climate change edited by staff from the Discipline of Botany, School of Natural Sciences. The other editors of the book are Steve Waldren and Mike Jones.

Cambridge University Press has published a book, entitled Climate Change, Ecology and Systematics, edited by TCD botanists from the School of Natural Sciences and the Trinity Centre for Biodiversity Research (Trevor Hodkinson, Mike Jones, John Parnell and Stephen Waldren).

It stresses how climate change has shaped life in the past and will continue to do so in the future. It also describes the challenge science faces to understand the interactions between climate and biodiversity - a key research theme of the School of Natural Sciences. With contributions from 60 key researchers, this book examines the ongoing impact of climate change on the ecology and diversity of life on earth. It discusses the latest research within the fields of ecology and systematics, highlighting the increasing integration of their approaches and methods. Topics covered include the influence of climate change on evolutionary and ecological processes such as adaptation, migration, speciation and extinction, and the role of these processes in determining the diversity and biogeographic distribution of species and their populations.

This book ultimately illustrates the necessity for global conservation actions to mitigate the effects of climate change in a world that is already undergoing a biodiversity crisis of unprecedented scale.
For more information see here.