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The macroecological contribution to global change solutions.

Kerr JT, Kharouba HM, Currie DJ

Department of Biology, Canadian Facility for Ecoinformatics Research (CFER), University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5 Canada. jkerr@uottawa.ca

Anthropogenic global changes threaten species and the ecosystem services upon which society depends. Effective solutions to this multifaceted crisis need scientific responses spanning disciplines and spatial scales. Macroecology develops broad-scale predictions of species' distributions and abundances, complementing the frequently local focus of global change biology. Macroecological discoveries rely particularly on correlative methods but have still proven effective in predicting global change impacts on species. However, global changes create pseudo-experimental opportunities to build stronger, mechanistic theories in macroecology that successfully predict multiple phenomena across spatial scales. Such macroecological perspectives will help address the biotic consequences of global change.

Published 15 June 2007 in Science, 316(5831): 1581-4.
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