Global Change Biology & The Future of Grasslands

To find an in depth definition of global change, I visited Global Change Biology online, which hosts many great scientific articles (our week 9 reading can be found here). According to the home page on their website, global change can be defined as:
"Global Change Biology defines global change as any consistent trend in the environment - past, present or projected - that affects a substantial part of the globe. Examples include:

• rising tropospheric, ozone (Links to an external site.), carbon dioxide (Links to an external site.) and sulphur dioxide concentrations
• increasing UV-B irradiation
• global climate change (Links to an external site.)
• biological sinks and sources of atmospheric trace gases
• euthrophication (Links to an external site.)
• land use change (Links to an external site.)
• loss of biodiversity (Links to an external site.)
• biological feedback (Links to an external site.) on climate change
• biological mitigation (Links to an external site.) for atmospheric change" (Links to an external site.)

I think it's worth noting that human activity can be included in global change and can affect the above-mentioned factors that can contribute to global change. Personally, I believe that global change will negatively affect grassland systems as we have repeatedly learned that rising temperatures can contribute to more severe weather conditions, which can affect fire events in grasslands. Cheatgrass is a species of concern within grasslands and we know that the invasion of the species is not unusual after unnatural disturbances. Additional changes in grassland ecosystems that may come from global change, in my opinion, will only be negative.

Source:
Global Change Biology. 2016. Aims and scope. Available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291365-2486