plant diversity are critical to the development of conservation strategies. These predictions have come largely from bioinformatic strategies, involving modeling individual species, groups of species such as 'functional types', communities, ecosystems or biomes. They can also involve modeling species observed environmental niches, or observed physiological processes. The velocity of climate change can also be involved in modelling future impacts as well. Although useful, modeling has many limitations. Firstly, there is uncertainty about the future levels of greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change and considerable uncertainty in modeling how this will affect other aspects of climate such as local rainfall or temperatures. For most species the importance of specific climatic variables in defining distribution (e.g. minimum rainfall or maximum temperature) is unknown. It is also difficult to know which aspects of a particular climatic variable are most biologically relevant, such as average vs. maximum or minimum temperatures. Ecological processes such as interactions between species and dispersal rates and distances are also inherently complex, further complicating predictions. Improvement of models is an active area of research, with new models attempting to take factors such as life-history traits of species or processes such as migration into account when predicting distribution changes; though possible trade-offs between regional accuracy and generality are recognised. Climate change is also predicted to interact with other drivers of biodiversity change such as habitat destruction and fragmentation, or the introduction of foreign species. These threats may possibly act in synergy to increase extinction risk from that seen in periods of rapid climate change in the past. Global warming and climate change are becoming a greater threat the longer we resist doing something about it on a massive scale.Though we’re already seeing its effects in droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and unprecedented temperature extremes both high and low, it’s not too late to slow it down and mitigate the effects. See also Biogeochemistry Desertification Extinction risk from climate change Effects of climate change Effects of climate change on ecosystems Mycorrhizae and changing climate Systems ecology References Further reading External links (2008) Government report on the effects of climate change on agriculture, land resources, water resources, and biodiversity in the United States. (2003) Summary report from an international conference on Global Climate Change and Biodiversity, Joint Nature Conservation Committee (2008) Discussion on the future of modeling climate change impacts on plant species distributions. on wilfried thuiller's website (2005) The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, including discussion