Meeting Abstract
Climate change is of intense interest because it has direct and indirect effects on all biota. Predicting impacts of environmental change on the distribution and abundance of species classically centers on physiological principles to the near exclusion of other biological disciplines. Physiology is an appropriate starting point for such models as predicted impacts of climate change both influence and can be mediated by physiology. However, climate change is rapid (in evolutionary terms), and often extreme, thereby potentially limiting the efficacy of physiological response as a means of “escape” from climate change. Indeed, animals interact with their environments in other important ways. For example, behavioral and cognitive responses (e.g. movement, perception, and learning) give animals a fast and often plastic response to current conditions, thus potentially offering a more time-appropriate and flexible response to environmental change. We will highlight the importance of incorporating learning and cognition into future efforts to predict the impact of and response to climate change, assess the status of behavioral and cognitive processes in recent conservation and climate change research, and offer a mechanistic approaches for integrating studies of animal behavior with climate change studies and conservation efforts. We contend that integrating behavioral and cognitive processes into our understanding of how animals respond to climate change is essential for conserving biodiversity, and therefore, we propose methods for integrating studies of animal behavior.
