AstMig:Who We Are
This website was established to facilitate research by a collection of biologists, economists, law professors, and ethicists who are collaborating on the subject of assisted migration. Assisted migration is the purposeful movement of organisms to locations where they have not previously occurred for the purposes of protecting or otherwise enabling them under climate change.
Human emissions of greenhouse gases have changed the composition of the atmosphere and are fundamentally altering climates worldwide. As many species are strongly affected by climate, we anticipate (and recent evidence shows) that biological systems will be significantly altered by climate change. Where the biology of a particular location becomes unsuitable for its new climate, populations, ecosystem services, and even species may decline. Many species will persist through climate change by shifting to higher latitudes and higher elevations naturally. Assisted migration is the process of artificially enabling the migration process in organisms that are prevented from moving naturally or enhancing that process in organisms with limited natural dispersal ability.
Assisted migration might be pursued for purposes of species conservation, the conservation of particular genotypes or rare alleles, or for the enhancement of an ecosystem service (e.g., timber production).
