April 5-6, 2008, at University of Aarhus, Denmark

DanBIF - Danish Biodiversity Information Facility;

Department of Biological Sciences, University of Aarhus;

Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen

The conference will address one of the most pressing scientific questions related to 21st century global warming: To what extent will global warming affect Earth's biodiversity including the natural systems that sustain human societies? The large-scale and long-term nature of this issue makes it exceedingly difficult to address by the traditional experimental approach. As evidenced by many studies, a biodiversity approach, capitalizing on recent gains in computing power, statistics, and data availability (as spear-headed by the Global Biodiversity information Facility, GBIF), is needed for broad synthetic assessments of the risks associated with the ongoing and predicted global warming. At the conference a suite of the World's leading scientists in biodiversity informatics and climate change biology will come together to provide a cutting-edge overview of the likely biodiversity consequences of 21st century global warming. Hereby the conference will provide an invaluable basis for the crucial further scientific progress on this issue and for policy makers and the climate change research community in general.

The conference will cover the key issues that need to be addressed by a biodiversity informatics approach to climate change biology.

On day 1, the conference will address what is known about the importance of climate for biodiversity.

On day 2, the conference will use the knowledge of the importance of past and present climate for biodiversity as a basis for providing quantitative predictions of the impacts of 21st century global warming.

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Programme

Photos in this portal:
Birds: © Kaj Kampp, Natural History Museum of Denmark.
Butterflies: © Klaus Hermansen, Lepidopterological Society, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Webeditor: Lotte Endsleff, DanBIF