The purpose of the workshop was to gather information and prepare a report on the current state of knowledge about effects of climate change. This report will be presented at the next world-wide environmental conference at Kyoto, Japan, this winter. Most of the papers were on birds, but butterflies, plants, intertidal invertebrates, amphibians and reptiles were also featured.
Correlations exist between local temperature changes and life history phenology.
Some birds are migrating up to 3 weeks earlier in the spring than previously, plants and birds are moving uphill in mountanous regions, and the distributions of some temperate butterfiles, amphibians, reptiles and intertidal invertebrates are moving gradually north. One striking feature of the workshop was the paucity of data concerning effects of climate change on amphibians. Alan Pounds, Monteverde Cloudforest Preserve, presented his data on climate change in Costa Rica and how these changes are correlated with extinctions and declines of Costa Rican amphibians. Russ Burke, of Hofstra University, presented his analysis of how new county records in the US illustrate that some amphibians are moving northward. Trevor Beebe, University of Sussex, indicated that higher springtime temperatures are correlated with earlier spawning in some, but not all, amphibians in England.