“CHANGES": CARBON, HYDROLOGY AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS - INTRODUCTION, BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE

Models of global change, either incorporating, or tested against data from palaeoenvironmental proxies, are a vital means of advancing understanding of future global change.

Despite the fact that continental shelves, karstlands and drylands together extend over more than 50% of the Earth’s landsurface area, they remain under-researched. “CHANGES” has brought together four international geological programmes in order to stimulate collaborative work across this broad environmental range, with particular reference to the last Glacial/Interglacial cycle. Data from these generic environments have great potential for refining and testing global change models, and their relevance to global carbon cycling is only beginning to be recognized; this link, still relatively little investigated in some earth environments, may have an important bearing upon carbon dynamics. When sea and lake levels fall, vegetation carbon storage decreases in deserts at the same time as it is enhanced on the emerging shelves. Such negative feedback responses need to be quantified in terms of both timing and relative change between environments.

Asking similar questions of specialists working in diverse and very different earth environments frequently stimulates scientific advance. “CHANGES” is using this approach in order to formulate key questions likely to reveal new research directions. Although the launching strategy of “CHANGES” has been to concentrate on karst, continental shelves, and drylands as three major terrestrial environments that have so far been under-utilized in climate modelling, it is to be expected that other neglected environments will be identified and incorporated as work progresses. Concerted and increasingly integrated collection and assessment of data on under-researched environments are now needed in order to fill some major gaps in current global climate modelling. Initial results of this database construction will be described and its likely future deployment briefly discussed.