A mechanistic approach reveals non linear effects of climate warming on mussels throughout the Mediterranean sea

There is a dire need to forecast the ecological impacts of global climate change at scales relevant to policy and management. We used three interconnected models (climatic, biophysical and energetics) to estimate changes in growth, reproduction and mortality risk by 2050, for three commercially and ecologically important bivalves at 51 sites in the Mediterranean Sea. These results predict highly variable responses (both positive and negative) in the time to reproductive maturity and in the risk of lethality among species and sites that do not conform to simple latitudinal gradients, and which would be undetectable by methods focused only on lethal limits and/or range boundaries.

Assessment of the ENSEMBLES stream 2 and comparison with PRESAO forecasts

The West African monsoon in ENSEMBLES stream 1

AMMA/ENSEMBLES

Testing the effects of temporal data resolution on predictions of the effects of climate change on bivalves

a b s t r a c t The spatial-temporal scales on which environmental observations are made can significantly affect our perceptions of ecological patterns in nature. Understanding potential mismatches between environmen- tal data used as inputs to predictive models, and the forecasts of ecological responses that these models generate are particularly difficult when predicting responses to climate change since the assumption of model stationarity in time cannot be tested. In the last four decades, increases in computational capacity (by a factor of a million), and the evolution of new modeling tools, have permitted a corresponding increase in model complexity, in the length of the simulations,…

Increasing the value of weather-related warnings

Interannual and decadal SST-forced responses of the West African monsoon

International audience; We review the studies carried out during the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA)-EU on the changes of interannual sea surface temperature (SST)-West African monsoon (WAM) covariability at multidecadal timescales, together with the influence of global warming (GW). The results obtained in the AMMA-EU suggest the importance of the background state, modulated by natural and anthropogenic variability, in the appearance of different interannual modes. The lack of reliability of current coupled models in giving a realistic assessment for WAM in the future is also stated.