Emigrate or Immigrate?
At a recent symposium on invasive species and climate change, I became intrigued by the idea of re-branding invasives as evasives - organisms that have left their area of origin to evade creeping climate change. In this regard, invasives are the survivors ...
It's similar to the concept of emigrating or immigrating, in that it depends on the perspective of whether something is leaving or arriving.
It may be a bit of a provocative perspective ... but it's great for making me think and question our previous knee-jerk responses to range expansions. I realize that preserving diversity is still a key consideration, but I do question how much 'managing' of inevitable change we think we should do ...
And yet, organisms that move in, take over, dominate and become monocultures do not support diversity - it seems that each species movement needs to be evaluated individually. So many ideas and possibilities to play with!
I certainly have more questions than answers since hearing all the presentations, but that's not a bad thing. I feel engaged and stimulated from the 2 days of exposure to recent research perspectives, and I'm back to believing I'm a young university student.
And now I wonder what will happen to those species that have nowhere further north to go?
No comments:
Post a Comment