Global Warming Reorganizing Ecosystems

Relying upon on how you frame it, the biodiversity critical situation looks very different. At a global level, we're losing species at an exceptional rate. It's predicted that creature are going abolished at a rate 1,000 times greater than they would if humans weren't around. And according to the UN, one million species are currently facing annihilation.
While annihilation is a global issue, individual habitat—tropical seas, temperate forests, arctic tundra—face a different dilemma. Instead of a loss in the total number of species, we’re seeing a reshuffling of life at local habitats, as a study published Thursday in Science reports.
"It's certainly true at a global scale that we're losing many species," says Shane Blowes, lead author of the study and an ecologist at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. "[But] at small scales we don't see the same ubiquitous loss of species." Instead, the species present in a given location are changing—and fast.
“[The study] confirms that there’s this steady turnover which goes back decades,” says Robert Colwell, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut who was not involved in the research. “I commend them on taking on undertaking a hugely ambitious project … they’ve done an excellent job with a really messy set of data.”
Sarah Supp, another author on the study and an ecologist at Denison University, says that scientists studying different regions had debated whether, on average, habitats throughout the world were gaining or losing species. But it was hard to get a complete picture of what was happening across landscapes and latitudes. To get lots of data, biologists had to request information held by institutions and governments—a time consuming and tedious process. The solution was to create their open-source database: BioTIME. Using information from 239 independent studies in BioTIME, they were able to map how the number of species and their composition changed over time at more than 50,000 sites around the globe. "It's really cool because it makes studies like this possible," says Supp. "It's a resource we hope will grow."
From their analysis, the ecologists found that the total number of organisms present at a site—known as species richness—isn’t changing much globally. Some sites did have declines in richness, but others had increases, and they averaged out to basically zero change in the number of species. “When you take all of them together—the ups and downs—they kind of wash each other out,” says Supp.

By – Abhishek Singh
Content - https://www.popsci.com/biodiversity-reshuffling-climate-change/