Will Biodiversity remain?

http://www.biology-online.org/articles/biodiversity-persist-face-climate-change.html

Can Biodiversity Persist In The Face Of Climate Change?   

 

Predictions made over the last decade about the impacts of climate change on biodiversity may be exaggerated, according to a paper published in the journal Science.

The two say that several larger scale models are failing to take into account local, more detailed variations and that these models often underestimate the full capacity of plants and animals to adapt to a changing climate.

The researchers predict that the species, instead of going instinct as previously thought, will adapt, migrate and turnover to survive in the climate they face. They say these models do not give credit to the plants and animals of the world and an example of it is forest butterflies in West Africa, which despite an 87 per cent reduction in forest cover, 97 per cent of species are still present.
http://www.globalissues.org/issue/169/biodiversity

Although over three quarters of the earth's deserts, grasslands, forests and tundra have changed because of human activity, the researchers say that even in this fragmented landscape species are surviving better than was previously predicted.

This is a picture of the forest butterfly from West Africa

 

Professor Kathy Willis, from the School for Geography and the Environment, expresses some caution about the apparent ability of species to survive in a more fragmented habitat. She said, "Presence or absence does not take into account lag effects of declining populations. Therefore, a more worrying interpretation is that the full effects of fragmentation will only be seen in future years."

My personal opinion is that we can not truly stop the progress humans are making upon the world, but we can help species adapt to the new enviroments that we are pushing onto them. An example would be to create a national park if a new city, or town, were to be built where animals are thriving.