This seminar by Professor Alexander Milner will overview the shrinkage of glacial ice mass in Alaska and other alpine and Arctic areas of the world with climate change and its effect on changing water sources and subsequent influence on biotic communities, both in terms of their structure and function. Implications for water resources will  also be discussed. Climate change will also lead to greater extreme events in terms of floods and droughts and two unique studies will be overviewed that provide insights into ecosystem responses to these extreme events.

Alexander Milner is Professor of River Ecosystems at the University of Birmingham in the UK and Professor of Aquatic Biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.  He has worked for many years in Alaska on the long term development of streams following glacial recession, but also on glacially influenced rivers in Greenland, Svalbard, Lapland, the French Pyrenees and New Zealand. The drought work was undertaken in the UK.