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Many serious ecosystem consequences of climate change will take decades or even centuries to emerge. Long-term ecological responses to global change are strongly regulated by slow processes, such as changes in species composition, carbon dynamics in soil and by long-lived plants, and accumulation of nutrient capitals. Understanding and predicting these processes require experiments on decadal time scales. But decadal experiments by themselves may not be adequate because many of the slow processes have characteristic time scales much longer than experiments can be maintained. This article promotes a coordinated approach that combines long-term, large-scale global change experiments with process studies and modeling. Long-term global change manipulative experiments, especially in high-priority ecosystems such as tropical forests and high-latitude regions, are essential to maximize information gain concerning future states of the earth system. The long-term experiments should be conducted in tandem with complementary process studies, such as those using model ecosystems, species replacements, laboratory incubations, isotope tracers, and greenhouse facilities. Models are essential to assimilate data from long-term experiments and process studies together with information from long-term observations, surveys, and space-for-time studies along environmental and biological gradients. Future research programs with coordinated long-term experiments, process studies, and modeling have the potential to be the most effective strategy to gain the best information on long-term ecosystem dynamics in response to global change.

Effects of climate warming on wild populations of organisms are expected to be greatest at higher latitudes, paralleling greater anticipated increases in temperature in these regions. Yet, these expectations assume that populations in different regions are equally susceptible to the effects of warming. This is unlikely to be the case. Here, we develop a series of predictive models for physiological thermal tolerances in ants based on current and future climates. We found that tropical ants have lower warming tolerances, a metric of susceptibility to climate warming, than temperate ants despite greater increases in temperature at higher latitudes. Using climatic, ecological and phylogenetic data, we refine our predictions of which ants (across all regions) were most susceptible to climate warming. We found that ants occupying warmer and more mesic forested habitats at lower elevations are the most physiologically susceptible to deleterious effects of climate warming. Phylogenetic history was also a strong indicator of physiological susceptibility. In short, we find that ants that live in the canopies of hot, tropical forest are the most at risk, globally, from climate warming. Unfortunately this is where many, perhaps most, ant and other species on Earth live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many serious ecosystem consequences of climate change will take decades or even centuries to emerge. Long-term ecological responses to global change are strongly regulated by slow processes, such as changes in species composition, carbon dynamics in soil and by long-lived plants, and accumulation of nutrient capitals. Understanding and predicting these processes require experiments on decadal time scales. But decadal experiments by themselves may not be adequate because many of the slow processes have characteristic time scales much longer than experiments can be maintained. This article promotes a coordinated approach that combines long-term, large-scale global change experiments with process studies and modeling. Long-term global change manipulative experiments, especially in high-priority ecosystems such as tropical forests and high-latitude regions, are essential to maximize information gain concerning future states of the earth system. The long-term experiments should be conducted in tandem with complementary process studies, such as those using model ecosystems, species replacements, laboratory incubations, isotope tracers, and greenhouse facilities. Models are essential to assimilate data from long-term experiments and process studies together with information from long-term observations, surveys, and space-for-time studies along environmental and biological gradients. Future research programs with coordinated long-term experiments, process studies, and modeling have the potential to be the most effective strategy to gain the best information on long-term ecosystem dynamics in response to global change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses research on the water retention benefits of discontinuous gas exchange cycles (DGCs) in insects. The water loss between DGCs and continuous gas exchange (CGE) in the larvae of Erynnis propertius were compared using flow-through respirometry. The results showed that respiratory water loss (RWL) are reduced by DGCs in E. propertius.

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