What was new was that we presented two very different approaches coming out of different disciplines. It's like looking at the data with different colored glasses. I found it incredibly stimulating to learn how to look at very familiar data from a new perspective. This intellectual going "out of the box" is something I'd like to see in more papers. In the end, it forced us to come up with new ways of analyzing the long-term data on species trends.

What our paper demonstrated was that even if you take a very conservative approach, it's more likely than not that climate change is having a big impact, in fact, it looks like about half of all species have shown some sort of response. That's a powerful message.

I've been involved with documenting species' responses to climate change for some time. But, this particular paper was motivated by arguments within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as to what our "bullet" conclusion should be on biological impacts of climate change. This is definitely a case where insight was born from strife.