Future Generations University, through this project, is establishing biomeridians in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Pacific. The vision is ultimately to grow a framework for global tracking of climate change impacts on local life.

In each biomeridian, that is up one mountain slope, vegetation will be visually described. At each of these sites, then, audio monitoring will record sounds, and these will catalog bird populations, which are the most rapidly adjusting of all life forms to habitat change. The electronic sensors will run day and night, and also record temperature and humidity. This is a very sophisticated scientific study, but the personnel managing this data collection will be local communities. They will not only collect data from the monitors, they also contribute local historical knowledge to the project.

Components of climate change, of course, are already being studied: rising temperature, CO2, oceans, and the like, aggregating data from atmosphere, temperature, ocean salinity, glacial melt, species extinction, new species entering established ecologies, and the like. But with all this growing data about climate change, missing has been what the consequences will be to plants, and animals, locale-by-locale. Nature’s fundamental balances are changing in intricate ways … but how.

Biomeridians have value beyond being transects to monitor climate change. To guide communities as they evolve their local responses, mini-biological transects (from undisturbed to highly impacted sites in their communities) will mimic the biomeridians. Paired experiments can be set up at these mini-biomeridians using the biomeridians as global standards, to inform adaptations by communities around the globe.

In sharing these responses site-to-site around the world, what is also being created are experimental sites to evolve best practices in community response to climate change. Through trial and error more effective solutions can be learned. Then, if cataloged globally, what will grow will position findings of effective local action in a global forum.

In this way, communities will be literally put on the map, as data from local transects feed into global databases. Local additions will not just find climate change answers, but through their participation empower communities. Empowered action is humanity’s (and Earth’s) best hope to ultimately evolve answers in the world that comes, adapting, always fitting to changing local reality.

There is a specific role for youth in this process. They have expertise with the technologies. They are the ones who inherit today’s changing climate. Youth organizations will be key in this project (Scout troops, schools, etc.). It is likely through the leadership of youth—they already own the technologies in their mobile phones and know how to use them—that through a self-assemble of complex, multi-sensory monitoring can grow a crowd sourced solution to the global imperative

Although a project of today, two centuries ago, Alexander von Humboldt climbed the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador. As he climbed, he painstakingly catalogued all the plants. This research two centuries ago was the bedrock for our modern concept of Nature and how Nature is distributes around the world as ecotones (tropics, subtropics, temperate, alpine, and arctic). Humboldt also showed how the Chimborazo volcano encapsulated this planetary diversity of ecology. See his graphic below.

In 2012, Humboldt’s study was repeated. Here are the findings from that 2012 comparison with his 1802 first study:

“Global climate change is driving species poleward and upward in high-latitude regions …. We revisited Chimborazo in 2012, precisely 2010 years after Humboldt’s expedition. We documented upward shifts in the distribution of vegetation zones as well as increased in maximum elevation limits of individual plant taxa of >500 meters on average. … Our findings provide evidence that global warming is strongly reshaping tropical plant distributions, consistent with Humboldt’s proposal that climate is the primary control on the altitudinal distribution of vegetation”

“Strong upslope shifts in Chimborazo’s vegetation over two centuries since Humboldt”
Naia Morueta-Holme, Dristine Engemann, Pablo Sandoval-Acuna, Jeremy D. Jonas R, Max Segnitz, and Jens-Christian Svenning. PANAS, October 13, 2015, Vol 112 no 41, pp 12741-12745

Along with Chimborazo, other historical data points also exist. When Makalu-Barun National Park was created in the 1980s, baseline botanical measurements were made. Similarly, there are baselines on the African mountains, and extensive data is available for Mauna Loa in Hawaii. In today’s era of global climate change, setting up a standardized monitoring approach in intact pristine natural transects will help grow localized understanding of the global phenomenon.

To measure life changing at planet scale, the first need is clarity on measurement method. Climate change currently is being measured by CO2, by rising temperature, aggregated species statistics, and the like. Specific dynamics are being tracked. Absent is measuring life change in its complexities. An index is needed against which the complexity of life can be measured. Or, stated another way, “pure Nature” needs to be defined—with that, a baseline will be created against which to measure change.

Here is a metaphor for the concept of biomeridian: Time. To make Time useful around the world, standardization was needed. First Zero Time, the point from which all time is measured. Greenwich Observatory was selected, and the instant at Greenwich when the sun crossed above, noon, became zero time. Also, standardization was required of time units: second minute, hour, year, and (moving from a lunar measure) the moment when the sun passed overhead at noon

Biological meridians are more complex; as Life is more complex than a standard march of moments. The transect is not of standardized units but change. Maximum diversity of life is where climate is most stable (the tropics), then as latitude increases toward polar regions, life diversity decreases as climate fluctuates and species become resilient to adapt to the change. Mountain transects mimic this latitudinal life zone change. Thus, one mountain slope collapses planetary latitudinal diversity and can serve as “measuring stick” that spans Earth’s biomes from the Equator to the poles.