Events & Courses

Climate change is projected to change the ecosystems on land and in the sea, and the rate of environmental change today has been unprecedented for millions of years.

Experiments assessing the impacts on marine ecosystems are unlike the real world - they are often limited to a select few species and drivers of environmental change, and hence cannot represent the complexity of interactions in ‘real’ ecosystems. The fossil record is an archive of responses to climate change at a global ecosystem scale, where the sensitivities of species (or higher taxa) to a specific environmental driver can be determined.

Professor Schmidt will explore historical and geological records of the response of marine ecosystems to environmental change, and the talk will give examples of the information that palaeontologists can contribute to the global challenge of estimating the impacts of climate change.

This is a joint public lecture with the Linnean Society.

Speaker

Daniela Schmidt, University of Bristol

Daniela is Professor for Palaeobiology at the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. She is an international expert on the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on marine ecosystems and their services.

Her work covers a range of organisms from bryozoans, bivalves and coralline algae to marine plankton. She has contributed as a lead author of the 2014 IPCC report WGII, is an Expert Group Member of EU SAPEA (Science Advice for Policy by European Academies) of the European Scientific Advice Mechanism (SAM) on the topic "Food from the Oceans", and is currently the coordinating lead author for the WGII IPCC on Europe.

Videos of past lectures can be viewed in our past meeting resources area.

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