By, Syed Hussain
“Wetland “ by David Heiserman is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
For my first blog I thought it might be a good idea to write on the pressing matter of climate change. More specifically I will be discussing the findings from a paper talking about the impacts of climate change on Wetlands, by Michener et al, which was written in 1997. The article concludes that the changes associated with climate change will drastically impact wetlands. These changes to wetlands will mainly because of hurricanes and other tropical storms. These factors will impact biodiversity number of extinctions in wetlands, and primary production. A few changes to wetland areas that I found alarming were that this study showed that salinization caused by climate change effects will make marshes in low lying forested areas more common, wetlands near coasts will move inland as seas rise, and there have been cases of mangroves turning into open water areas.
If one goes through the article, it is clear that climate change is changing habitats. These changes, as we have learned in many of our courses, usually happen over a long period of time, but because of climate change they are occurring much faster. The article also talks about how human disturbance is adding toxic chemicals into these wetlands as well. There are also permafrost wetlands, according to the study that are at risk of melting further north. This means that if we wish to stop further global warming, we need to do more to protect wetlands.
If you wish to read more about this, here is a link to the original article: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1890/1051-0761%281997%29007%5B0770%3ACCHATS%5D2.0.CO%3B2
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 