While you may be right about change faster than nature, what you are implying may not be so easily done. Indeed, what it sounds like to me is basically translocation of plants - introducing species in places where we "think" they would end up after some interval of time, given large uncertainties in climate change. First, we must remember that introduced species are a major environmental problem today - basically, we have alread= y introduced weeds and invasive plants and animals the world over. Will we continue that process thinking that where we put the organisms is where nature will have done so eventually? Evolution is a predictive process?
Maintaining adaptedness? I am at a loss to even figure out what that means. Organisms are adapted by natural selection to their environments. Stephen J. Gould has shown us that this can happen quickly, and Darwin figured it to happen slowly. But, there is ample evidence that it can happen relatively quickly. Maintaining adaptedness seems to me to imply stasis - keeping plants the way they are in the face of climate change by moving them to places for which they are already adapted. Just monitoring climate and imagining moving plants around to follow what we think are goin= g to be long-term climate changes (considering how much they can vary over ou= r lifetimes without really changing in the long term context) gives me the heeby jeebies - as someone said, a way for someone to get funded for years to come, but with no real scientific basis or accounting. After all, how would we know it worked? Check back in 500 years, 1000? Finally, you mentioned trees, but what about the millions of other species in a community or ecosystem? Do we assume that the species we don't move around will figure out how to find and follow the ones we do? We should all read David Ehrenfeld's great book, now out of print - "The arrogance of humanism" - so that we can look on our supposed "fix-its" for what they are - self-deception that when things get bad enough, someone wil= l come up with a way to fix it. The only problem is, fix-its usually don't. Sure, we can build underpasses for turtles, salamanders and what not, and teach a Whooping Crane how to fly south for the winter, but for the million= s of other species that will have to cope, these are psuedo-solutions that only give funding to the wrong places. What we need is prevention, because we sure won't know how to fix what we are breaking. Cheers, Jim On 7/19/07, jerry rehfeldt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > There's no doubt whatsoever that projected rates of change are far greate= r > than natural processes can accommodate. Maintaining adaptedness in plant > populations will require the assistance of mankind to transfer the > appropriate populations of the appropriate species to the new location of > their climatic optima. Assisting migration, therefore, is only a part of > the > managerial options. Maintaining adaptedness, particularly in trees, will > require us to participate in the evolutionary process; we must be willing > to > provide the fuel for speeding up the process of selection. > > In forestry, the information is available for providing appropriate > guidelines. However, I am not aware of current reforestation, rehab, or > conservation programs that are targeting climates of the 2020's. The > closest > that I know of involves the effort of researchers to find a 'home' in > British Columbia for populations of California's Brewer spruce, a species > classified today as threatened. > --=20 -- James J. Roper, Ph.D. Ecologia e Din=E2micas Populacionais de Vertebrados Terrestres ------------------------------ Caixa Postal 19034 81531-990 Curitiba, Paran=E1, Brasil ------------------------------ E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telefone: 55 41 33857249 Mobile: 55 41 99870543 ------------------------------ Ecologia e Conserva=E7=E3o na UFPR <http://www.bio.ufpr.br/ecologia/> Econci=EAncia - Consultoria e Tradu=E7=F5es <http://jjroper.googlespages.co= m>
