TY - JOUR

T1 - Complexity in Climate Change Manipulation Experiments

AU - Kreyling, Juergen

AU - Beier, Claus

N1 - Funding Information: We thank three anonymous reviewers for constructive critique on earlier versions of the manuscript. JK received financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service and CB from the Villum Kann Rasmussen Foundation’s CLIMAITE project, the European Union’s INCREASE network (contract no. 227628), and the Analysis and Experimentation on Ecosystems project (contract no. 312690).

PY - 2013

Y1 - 2013

N2 - Climate change goes beyond gradual changes in mean conditions. It involves increased variability in climatic drivers and increased frequency and intensity of extreme events. Climate manipulation experiments are one major tool to explore the ecological impacts of climate change. Until now, precipitation experiments have dealt with temporal variability or extreme events, such as drought, resulting in a multitude of approaches and scenarios with limited comparability among studies. Temperature manipulations have mainly been focused only on warming, resulting in better comparability among studies. Congruent results of meta-analyses based on warming experiments, however, do not reflect a better general understanding of temperature effects, because the potential effects of more complex changes in temperature, including extreme events, are not yet covered well. Heat, frost, seasonality, and spatial variability in temperature are ecologically important. Embracing complexity in future climate change experiments in general is therefore crucial.

AB - Climate change goes beyond gradual changes in mean conditions. It involves increased variability in climatic drivers and increased frequency and intensity of extreme events. Climate manipulation experiments are one major tool to explore the ecological impacts of climate change. Until now, precipitation experiments have dealt with temporal variability or extreme events, such as drought, resulting in a multitude of approaches and scenarios with limited comparability among studies. Temperature manipulations have mainly been focused only on warming, resulting in better comparability among studies. Congruent results of meta-analyses based on warming experiments, however, do not reflect a better general understanding of temperature effects, because the potential effects of more complex changes in temperature, including extreme events, are not yet covered well. Heat, frost, seasonality, and spatial variability in temperature are ecologically important. Embracing complexity in future climate change experiments in general is therefore crucial.

KW - climate change

KW - experiments

KW - extreme events

KW - temporal variability

KW - warming

U2 - 10.1525/bio.2013.63.9.12

DO - 10.1525/bio.2013.63.9.12

M3 - Review

AN - SCOPUS:84884690421

VL - 63

SP - 763

EP - 767

JO - BioScience

JF - BioScience

SN - 0006-3568

IS - 9

ER -