Biological Consequences of Global Change: past and future.

Zoology encompasses an increasing amount of research on the question of global change, including the biodiversity losses, pest outbreaks, disease transmission, biological invasions and many other aspects. This is the third issue of Integrative Zoology, with papers focusing specifically on these topics, with collaboration of the Biological Consequences of Global Change (BCGC) program. The BCGC program of the International Society for Zoological Sciences (ISZS) was adopted by the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) in 2009. Since then, we have been analyzing and sharing information, in order to integrate international data and form collaborations that seek to solve global issues which correspond with zoological changes caused by climate change. This program gives collaborators a platform by which to monitor, for example, how wildlife habitat loss in one region affects species invasions, enables the transmission of disease in another region, and to what extent do such changes affect us globally. Therefore, the program involves scientists from around the world whose various backgrounds and wealth of experience allows them to consider the complex issue of global change in ways that are beneficial to the international scientific community as a whole. Their collective knowledge helps to promote understanding of BCGC and, by extension, improves the management of our earth. We present new research of the BCGC in Integrative Zoology. One special issue was published in Jun 2010 and a second subsection Jun 2012, with a special issue on biological invasions following in Sep 2012. Some studies found that global change has had negative effects on wildlife. Charles-Edouard Imbert and his colleagues reported that global warming allows for the expansion of the pine processionary moth that, in turn, induces a significant change in food quality for the endangered Spanish moon moth (Imbert et al. 2012). However, some of our studies imply that the impacts of global change are not always negative. This line of thinking contradicts previous opinions and provides us with a new perspective to on climate warming. For example, locust outbreaks and drought in ancient China occurred more frequently in cold weather rather than in warm periods (Tian et al. 2011) and Craig D. Millar et al. (2012) found that Adélie penguins respond and adjust to temperature changes in Antarctica. Therefore, global change may be highly dependent on which taxa groups are studied (Buckeridge 2012), which regions are considered (Oswald & Arnold 2012) or which time-scale is taken for analysis (Li et al. 2010). In this issue, we see a variety of species (i.e. birds and amphibians) studied in various ways, such as species modelling, to determine the effects of global change on aspects of our world, for example, altering biodiverisity, reproduction concerns and other developmental issues. We have also tackled the problem of ethics within scientific research. We hope these papers on BCGC will help all of us understand the effects of climate change in an integrative manner and allow scientists from around the world to work more closely together. BCGC plans to expand its team in order to learn more about regional differences in response to biological aspects of global change.