Environmental Prediction
Among the activities of the Center for 2017, Assistant Professor Dr. Siddiq Hayali gave a lecture entitled "Environmental Prediction" Where the summary of the lecture was included:
Environmental prediction means the using of available evidences and knowledge of physics, ecology and public health to predict how the environment will change in the future in response to environmental stress such as pollutants. In other words, it is the process of predicting the future trajectories of ecological systems is increasingly important as the magnitude of anthropogenic perturbation of the earth systems grows.
Ecological systems are strongly impacted by anthropogenic ally induced perturbations such as global climate change and the spread of nonnative species. Predicting the effects of these perturbations on natural systems is increasingly important as the magnitude and severity of anthropogenic perturbations intensify. But are ecological systems fundamentally predictable?
Prediction refers to the use of a computational or mathematical model to forecast the future state of a system to some specified level of accuracy before the system reaches its future state.
Types of predictability
There two types of predictability which are:
- Intrinsic or theoretical predictability. This type is in general theoretical and associated with strong limits on the ecological systems that arise from inherent characteristics of biological systems nevertheless it can be improved through improved model structure or specification of parameters.
- Realized predictability. This type is achieved using available models and parameterizations and it can be limited by process and parameter misspecification or uncertainty.
ECOLOGICAL EXAMPLES
- Climate change. Current climate change represents a rapid and complex multivariate shift in the environmental conditions experienced by individual organisms. Global temperatures are rapidly rising and approaching a region of climate space not likely experienced for the past years. Climate change is the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature of the earth’s climate system and its related effects. Multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is warming. Many of the observed changes since the 1950s are unprecedented in the instrumental temperature which extends back to the mid-19th century. Future climate change and associated impacts will differ from region to region. Anticipated effects include increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels, changing precipitation and expansion of desert.
- Invasive species: Predicting which introduced non-native species will displace native species and which ecological communities are vulnerable to invasion are two principle goals of invasion ecology that have not been achieved. The response of an introduced species to the concurrent effects of introduction into a novel high-dimensional environmental space while also merging into an existing network of interacting species is a problem for which, by definition, we have little empirical basis for prediction. Experience does indicate, however, that the introduction of an invasive species can cascade through a community with complex and apparently random effects on community structure. Thus, the only way to understand the potential for an introduced species to be invasive in a particular ecological community may be to observe empirically whether it is invasive in that ecological community.
