The silver chub isn’t considered sensitive to climate change on a national scale, but context matters.
The silver chub isn’t considered sensitive to climate change on a national scale, but context matters. For example, if climate change sensitivity is evaluated in only one region of the United States, the freshwater fish appears quite a bit more susceptible.
“Relative to other species we looked at in the gulf region of the U.S., the silver chub occupied a pretty small geographic area,” said Samuel Silknetter, a Ph.D. student in biological sciences. “If we didn’t look at the climate sensitivity across multiple spatial scales, a regional analysis alone may miss the bigger context of why a species appears sensitive to climate change at some scales but not others, especially compared to other species.”
Silknetter and Associate Professor Meryl Mims recently led a team that explored the influence the spatial extent of research – the geographical coverage of data collected – has on evaluating the sensitivity of different fish species to climate change. The findings were published in Ecosphere.
Read more at Virginia Tech
Image: (From left) Samuel Silknetter and Meryl Mims published a paper in Ecosphere about the vulnerability of freshwater fish species to climate change. Photo by Felicia Spencer for Virginia Tech. (Credit: Photo by Felicia Spencer for Virginia Tech)
