Impacts and Its Adaptation of Global Change

It is important research fields of global change ecology to study the influence that global climate change has on ecosystem and agroforestry, environmental factor such as water resources. And it is also important scientific basis on which to cope with climate change, to manage ecosystem adaptively and to make relevant policies. If the change of the earth system’s strength power is the ultimate concern of global climate change study, it will be to focus on questions to recognize the change of ecosystem’s structure, process, and function motivated by climate change and human activities. The earth feeds on massive diverse natural ecosystem, and diverse semi-natural semi-artificial ecosystem, which is already a result of a long-term adaption of the earth to natural environment and human activities. In that case, the adaption research of the ecosystem to the environment change plays a key role in humans getting to know what influence global changes may have on the supporting capacity of earth system. This chapter mainly concerns about the ecosystem’s adaptability. It is defined as the adaptive abilities of lowering environment changes’ negative influence and making good use of favorable opportunities when environment changes but the ecosystem tries to maintain its main functions. And this balance mechanism and adaptability of ecosystem is a basis on which to judge the influence degrees of global changes on ecosystem’s structure and function. To dig into this question, we generally study from two different perspectives, one of which is global changes’ influence on the ecosystem, and the other one is the ecosystem’s responses to these changes, which is the principal framework of this chapter.