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    Abstract:
    Significance Accurate prediction of community responses to global change drivers (GCDs) is critical given the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem services. There is consensus that human activities are driving species extinctions at the global scale, but debate remains over whether GCDs are systematically altering local communities worldwide. Across 105 experiments that included over 400 experimental manipulations, we found evidence for a lagged response of herbaceous plant communities to GCDs caused by shifts in the identities and relative abundances of species, often without a corresponding difference in species richness. These results provide evidence that community responses are pervasive across a wide variety of GCDs on long-term temporal scales and that these responses increase in strength when multiple GCDs are simultaneously imposed.
    Keywords:
    Global Change
    Environmental change
    During the last centuries, humans have transformed global ecosystems. With their temporal dimension, herbaria provide the otherwise scarce long-term data crucial for tracking ecological and evolutionary changes over this period of intense global change. The sheer size of herbaria, together with their increasing digitization and the possibility of sequencing DNA from the preserved plant material, makes them invaluable resources for understanding ecological and evolutionary species' responses to global environmental change. Following the chronology of global change, we highlight how herbaria can inform about long-term effects on plants of at least four of the main drivers of global change: pollution, habitat change, climate change and invasive species. We summarize how herbarium specimens so far have been used in global change research, discuss future opportunities and challenges posed by the nature of these data, and advocate for an intensified use of these 'windows into the past' for global change research and beyond.
    Herbarium
    Global Change
    Environmental change
    Digitization
    Citations (178)
    Environmental change
    Global Change
    Deforestation
    Global environmental analysis
    Extinction (optical mineralogy)
    Global change has altered biodiversity and impacted ecosystem functions and services around the planet. Understanding the effects of anthropogenic drivers like human use and climate change on biodiversity change has become a key challenge for science and policy. However, our knowledge of biodiversity change is limited by the available data and their biases. Over land and sea, we test the representation of three worldwide and multi-taxa biodiversity databases (Living Planet, BioTIME and PREDICTS) across spatial and temporal variation in global change and across the tree of life. We find that variation in global change drivers is better captured over space than over time around the world and across the previous 150 years. Spatial representation of global change was as high as 78% in the marine realm and 31% on land. Our findings suggest ways to improve the use of existing biodiversity data and better target future ecological monitoring.
    Global Change
    Environmental change
    Representation
    Global biodiversity
    Citations (8)
    The paper reviewed firstly Global Change Open Science Conference 2001 held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and analyzed the important parts of the impact of human activities in the global change in various fields of the study of global change. Then, the author set forth the important direct of the study of land use/cover change and its impact on eco environment security in the study of global change and sustainable development in China, so as to reveal the driving force of land use change, ecologic affect of land cover change, and the mechanism of land use/cover pattern on the eco environmental security. With a view to the effect of the ecologic environment of China on the global change, under the condition of the eco environmental security of China, the spatial macro pattern has been reestablished.
    Global Change
    Environmental change
    Land Cover
    Environmental security
    Citations (3)
    During the last centuries, humans have transformed global ecosystems. With their temporal dimension, herbaria provide the otherwise scarce long-term data crucial to track ecological and evolutionary changes over these centuries of global change. The sheer size of herbaria, together with their increasing digitization and the possibility of sequencing DNA from the preserved plant material, makes them invaluable resources to understand ecological and evolutionary species responses to global environmental change. Following the chronology of global change, we highlight how herbaria can inform about long-term effects on plants of at least four of the main drivers of global change: pollution, habitat change, climate change, and invasive species. We summarize how herbarium specimens so far have been used in global change research, discuss future opportunities and challenges posed by the nature of these data, and advocate for an intensified use of these 'windows into the past' for global change research and beyond.
    Herbarium
    Global Change
    Environmental change
    Digitization
    During the last centuries, humans have transformed global ecosystems. With their temporal dimension, herbaria provide the otherwise scarce long-term data crucial to track ecological and evolutionary changes over these centuries of global change. The sheer size of herbaria, together with their increasing digitization and the possibility of sequencing DNA from the preserved plant material, makes them invaluable resources to understand ecological and evolutionary species responses to global environmental change. Following the chronology of global change, we highlight how herbaria can inform about long-term effects on plants of at least four of the main drivers of global change: pollution, habitat change, climate change, and invasive species. We summarize how herbarium specimens so far have been used in global change research, discuss future opportunities and challenges posed by the nature of these data, and advocate for an intensified use of these 'windows into the past' for global change research and beyond.
    Herbarium
    Global Change
    Digitization
    Environmental change
    The paper reviewed several important issues related to global change research, including the components of global change, the advance in global change research and the new direction of global change research. The global change now refers not only to global climate change, but also to world population growth, atmospheric composition change, biogeochemical cycle change, land use and cover change, and loss of biodiversity, etc. The future global change research will center around the impact of global change on biodiversity, the effects of interaction among elevated CO 2, nutrient, temperature and water on ecosystem processes, the ecological studies of landscape level processes and human dimensions of global change.
    Global Change
    Environmental change
    Biogeochemical Cycle
    Global population
    Water cycle
    Citations (1)