Vertebrate Fossils: Fauna Paleodatabase

Climate is rapidly changing. Increased temperatures, frequent droughts, fires and floods, and rising sea levels are likely to have deep impacts on landscapes, species distributions, economical activities and human health. In order to better understand current global changes and to project future scenarios, knowledge of past climate-ecosystem dynamics is imperative. Although the past does not provide a prescriptive guide to the future, it allows the inference of environmental variability and the underlying processes that form the basis for an evaluation of present day trends, future probabilities and likely consequences on human activities and welfare. The vital role of paleo-science in global change discussions is widely acknowledged. As a result, environmental policy and decision makers worldwide are increasingly using paleo environmental data (derived from marine and lake sediments, ice cores, tree rings, boreholes, corals, etc.) to to help guide environmental management policies.

气候正经历快速变化。气温升高、干旱、野火与洪涝频发以及海平面上升，均可能对地貌景观、物种分布、经济活动与人类健康造成深远影响。为更深入地理解当前全球变化并预测未来情景，掌握过去的气候-生态系统动态变化至关重要。尽管过往气候状况无法为未来提供规范性指引，但其可帮助我们推断环境变异性与背后的驱动过程，而这些正是评估当前趋势、未来发生概率以及其对人类活动与福祉可能产生影响的基础。古科学（paleo-science）在全球变化议题中的关键作用已得到广泛认可。为此，全球各地的环境政策制定者与决策者正愈发多地使用古环境数据（源自海洋与湖泊沉积物、冰芯、树木年轮、钻孔、珊瑚等），以助力环境管理政策的制定。