Photo by Jim Maragos [CC BY-NC 2.0]
Ecology
Predicting Disaster:
Using Ecology to Fight Climate Change By Alex Reulbach
Coral providing shelter from predation to reef fish.
R
apidly rising temperatures and adverse human activities have ravaged habitats across the world, and efforts to slow the pace of destruction have been futile. As the climate crisis continues to irreversibly alter many crucial ecosystems globally, innovative techniques are required to curb the extensive damage that has been done to the environment. Due to the onset of climate change that has wreaked havoc on both terrestrial and marine ecosystems in the last several decades, conservation ecology has largely been a reactive science. One approach championed by marine ecologists Dr. John Bruno and Dr. Mark Bertness suggests that, for conservation ecology to become a predictive rather than reactive science, the conceptual framework of the science of ecology has to be reconfigured. The researchers argue that conservation ecology must focus on positive instead of negative interactions between species if it is to develop into a successful predictive science that prevents future ecological disasters. Dr. Bruno, a marine ecologist and Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has studied ecology for over 25 years. Dr. Bruno’s journey into conservation ecology began when he was working to earn
his Ph.D. at Brown University back in the late 1990s.¹ At Brown, he conducted his research in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology under the guidance of his mentor and Ph.D. advisor Dr. Bertness. It was during a conservation ecology symposium honoring Dr. Bertness’s retirement that the two colleagues joined forces with fellow conservation ecologists Dr. Andrew Altieri and Ph.D. students Hallie Fischman and Sinead Crotty to try to fundamentally alter the landscape of conservation ecology. To understand why the team’s push to focus on positive species interaction is so groundbreak-
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Figure 1 : Hawk competing with with a mouse for limited resources.
