How much will strawberry harvests shrink when extreme heat harms pollinators? How much will timber production decline when windstorms flatten forests? How much will recreational value disappear when large wildfires sweep through mountain towns?

These are some critical questions that a new computer simulation is helping answer. Researchers, including Peter Reich of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), presented a model that aims to understand how extreme weather events, worsened by climate change, will affect ecosystems and the benefits they provide to humans.

Previous models for predicting how ecosystems respond to climate change tend to assume that changes are steady. For example, a gradual increase in global temperatures of up to 1.5°C. But as climate change makes extreme weather events like wildfires and floods more frequent and severe, the impacts from rapid disturbances have become significant.

Reich and the team developed a new mathematical model that tracks how the probability of an extreme weather event affects certain species and the ecosystem services they provide. The model also incorporates how people value these services.

“We’re not the first people to try this and we won’t be the last, but it’s an attempt to holistically connect climate disturbances and natural processes,” said Reich, director of the Institute for Global Change Biology at SEAS. “It’s linking biodiversity and different kinds of ecological responses, some of which are services to people, and answering how we might go about trying to put dollar values on those services.”

Study: Quantifying disturbance effects on ecosystem services in a changing climate

Read the full press release on the Michigan News website.