Global biodiversity is changing quickly as a complex response to several human-induced changes in the global environment. The magnitude of this change is so large that it will clearly affect society's use of natural resources, and biodiversity change is now considered an important global change in its own right.

Although we are familiar with the efforts to develop scenarios of change in climate or concentration of greenhouse gases, there hasn't been much of an effort to develop scenarios of biodiversity, which are likely to affect ecosystem functioning as much as climate and greenhouse gases do.

GCTE has been working on developing biodiversity scenarios for the year 2100 during the last three years. The activity led by Osvaldo Sala and Terry Chapin has developed a variety of possible global biodiversity scenarios based on scenarios of changes in atmospheric CO₂, climate, vegetation, and land use and the known sensitivity of biodiversity to these changes in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. This study identified (1) a ranking of the importance of drivers; (2) a ranking of the biomes with respect to expected changes; and (3) the major sources of uncertainties.

The main results will be published in an upcoming issue of Science (Sala et al. Science 2000, February), and the per biome analyses will be published this year in a book within the Springer Series. More information on the results of this study will be posted on this site after the paper in Science has been published.

For further information on the Biodiversity Scenarios activity, please contact Osvaldo Sala (Sala@ifeva.edu.ar) or Terry Chapin (fschapin@bonanza.lter.uaf.edu)