This talk will take place at the Swaner EcoCenter both indoors and on the back deck. Please come prepared to spend time outdoors.

Rapid climate change is already impacting species and ecosystems, often in dramatic fashion. What can we expect for the future? Paleoecologists Jack Williams and Jesse Morris answer this question using lessons from the past, with a focus on examples from Utah. Records from plant pollen and charcoal left by fires provide a rich picture of how ecosystems and disturbance regimes responded to shifts in climate over previous millennia. Peter Adler will then describe an alternative approach to these questions: the use of computer models to forecast ecological impacts of climate change. While forecasts from the current models are tremendously uncertain, understanding the surprising sources of that uncertainty can help us design new research to improve the models.