ABSTRACT
Estimating the potential impacts of climate change on ecological function, biodiversity, and human subsistence use for northern North America encompasses a wide range of complex systems over long time horizons. Little is known about the physiological and ecological limits to species distributions and biological processes of northern landscapes. This chapter describes climate change scenarios representing doubled carbon dioxide atmospheric conditions for North America and assesses the scenarios in terms of their potential impacts on natural ecosystems and protected areas. General implications of these continental scale changes are then suggested for biotic resources of northern regions. Two methods of analysis emphasize important differences in the interpretation of potential climate change with respect to short- and long-term ecological implications. Changes in climatic zones correlated with current vegetation distributions are used to identify potential long-term environmental stresses on continental-scale biogeographical patterns.
