Abstract
Predicted climate changes will affect nature as a whole. For a better understanding of species-distribution and species-composition as a response to climate change it is important to consider comparable information on dynamic biodiversity across groups oforganisms in time and space. It is known that climate changes will have a strong effect on species-distribution and species-composition in areas where numerous species occur at or near their distributional border. These biological transition zones can be detected as regions with unusually high species-turnover, i.e. ecotones. The project focuses on the rate-of-change in species-composition for different organisms (vascular plants. ferns, chironomids, diatoms, mites, etc.) and a combination of palaeorecords and spatial data allows the spatio-temporal history of species-turnover to be addressed. With a new statistical procedure for ecotone detection the ecotone and inter-ecotone species-turnover will be quantified in both time and space. The combined use of spatial and temporal biological-and climatological-data provide the opportunity of testing the effect of climate conditions and change on dynamic biodiversity, and testing if the groups of organisms differ in their response to climate change. This enables an identification of areas with a particularly high economic andnature vulnerability.
Norway