The effects of climate change in the tropics are manifesting as changes in species abundances, shifts in ranges, and changes in the timing of life history events, like fruiting and flowering of trees, according to a literature review published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics and authored by a University of Tennessee, Knoxville, professor.

Climate plays a major role in the distribution and abundance of species, and climate change will likely alter life in the tropics.

“One of the clearest signals of the impact of climate change in the tropics has been the upslope movement of a variety of species,” said Kimberly Sheldon, author of the review and assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “With warming, we would predict species would move toward higher elevations, and we see that tropical birds, moths, trees, and herpetofauna are all shifting upslope.”

Four UT students have been awarded Fulbright US Student Program Grants for 2016–17:

Desiree Dube, a senior in history and Russian studies, will spend the next academic year teaching English in Russia. Dube, of Clarksville, Tennessee, will be working at a Russian university and starting a book club there.

Kathleen “Kassie” Ernst, a doctoral student in energy geography at the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, will be going to Norrköping, Sweden, to study climate related issues. Ernst, who is from Whitehall, Wisconsin, will be working with the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute to find ways of making climate information gleaned from models more usable for urban policy makers.

A better understanding of how carbon cycles through the ocean could advance our knowledge of climate change, according to a UT researcher.

From beach shallows to the ocean depths, vast numbers of microbes work together to transform and store atmospheric carbon in the world’s oceans, compounds collectively referred to as dissolved organic carbon (DOC). But studying the connections between those ocean-borne compounds and microbes has been impractical because of their huge number and complexity—until now.

Internationally recognized earth scientist,Berrien Moore III, is visiting the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to speak on climate change and the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.