Les Kaufman Authors Book Chapter on Climate Change Impacts on Freshwater Ecosystems

Les Kaufman, a professor in the Department of Biology and a Faculty Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, recently authored a book chapter published in the new second edition of Biodiversity and Climate Change: Transforming the Biosphere (Yale University Press 2019), edited by Thomas E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah.

Prof. Kaufman’s chapter, titled “Climate Change: Final arbiter of the mass extinction of freshwater fishes,” explores how each of the four horsemen of global climate change — warming, volatility, sea level rise, and acidification — affect freshwater ecosystems.

“No matter the approach taken, the data shout for themselves: the global freshwater fish fauna is facing mass extinction, with climate change a major contributing factor,” Kaufman writes.

Prof. Lovejoy, who co-edited the book, delivered the annual Pardee Center Distinguished Lecture, titled “Biology and Climate Change,” on March 28, 2017. Click here to watch the recording of the lecture.

At the Pardee Center, Prof. Kaufman leads the Coupled Human and Natural Systems (CHANS) research program, which investigates how governance, social, and economic systems are intricately connected to natural systems, and the trade-offs that confront those making resource management decisions. Specifically, this work explores the relationship between biodiversity and human well being, food-energy-water systems dynamics, and recovery of coral reef systems. The research encompasses four geographic areas: Cambodia (Tonle Sap and the Mekong Delta), East Africa (Lake Victoria), South Florida and Belize (the tropical west Atlantic and Caribbean Basin), and the Gulf of Maine.