The missing piece in climate change? Scientists say it could be wind

If scientists want to understand how ecosystems will respond to a changing climate, they might need to look beyond how hot and wet the future becomes and ask how windy it will be too.

Research by scientists at the University of Pretoria on a remote island in the Southern Ocean suggests that wind could be an overlooked force shaping plants, ecosystems and even seabirds.

Marion Island lies in the latitudes known as the “Roaring Forties” and is one of the windiest environments in the world. Gale-force winds are part of daily life, making the roughly 290km² sub-Antarctic island an extraordinary natural laboratory for understanding how persistent wind shapes an ecosystem – from where plants grow to how birds fly.

“Temperature and rainfall are fundamental to understanding climate change but they are not the whole climate system,” said professor Peter Le Roux of the university’s department of plant and soil sciences. “Our work on Marion Island is showing that wind can influence ecological patterns at a remarkably fine scale.”

Le Roux said that understanding how wind regimes changed was important for determining what happens to organisms living at the limits of what they could tolerate.

“Our work shows that wind conditions really matter for plants and animals in the sub-Antarctic. For example, two sites that are close together but have different wind exposure can have very different vegetation, both in terms of which types of plants occur at the site and in terms of how those plants grow. 

“This impact of spatial variation in wind conditions suggests that temporal variation will also matter. In other words, if two sites that differ in wind exposure have different vegetation characteristics now.

“This provides a basis for forecasting how changes in wind speed and turbulence at one site through time will affect the ecosystem there — and this is the basis for our prediction that shifts in wind patterns driven by global climate change will have substantial consequences for sub-Antarctic ecosystems.