Gosh that’s rotten. Scientist predict that climate change will alter our wetlands. You know, the things we will need most to absorb all the storms and flooding caused by Climate Change.

Too bad there isn’t some kind of natural solution that can create wetlands where ever it goes for free. But I’m sure if that were possible the scientists would have mentioned it, right?

Climate change will disrupt inland wetlands in North America, study finds

In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Michigan focused on improving the simulation of inundated wetlands using a state-of-the-science ESM that includes physical mechanisms of inundation and a range of climate scenarios to project changes and predict factors that can control wetland dynamics.

With the refined model, researchers further found the wetlands over North America will be significantly affected by climate change under future scenarios.

The results reveal projected changes in wetland characteristics over North America from 25° to 53° North under two climate scenarios using a state-of-the-science ESM. At the continental scale, annual wetland area decreases by ~10% (6%–14%) under the high emission scenario, but tiotemporal changes vary, reaching up to ±50%.

Gosh that’s rotten news. So many living things depend on those wetlands. And they are going to be in even worse shape with Climate Change.

As the dominant driver of these changes shifts from precipitation to temperature in the higher emission scenario, wetlands undergo substantial drying during the summer season when biotic processes peak. The projected disruptions to wetland seasonality cycles imply further impacts on biodiversity in major wetland habitats of the upper Mississippi, Southeast Canada, and the Everglades.

Furthermore, wetlands are projected to significantly shrink in cold regions due to increased infiltration as warmer temperatures reduce soil ice. The large dependence of the projections on climate change scenarios underscores the importance of emission mitigation to sustaining wetland ecosystems in the future.