In the end, 280 researchers and natural resource managers gathered in a city toward the bottom of the world. An echo of the pole-ward shift of species occurring at an average rate of tens of kilometres per decade across land (17km per decade) and sea (78km).

This month they will converge again, in South Africa.

IN OTHER NEWS

Studies show at least 25 per cent of species are already changing their geographic distribution around the globe, driven largely by a changing climate. The number could be as high as 85 per cent. These are movements with potential to cause large and unexpected ecological impacts.

"Most scientific conferences are really quite focused," said Gretta Pecl. "They might be about marine systems, or they might be about the tropics, or they might only be about polar systems." But this event, dubbed Species on the Move, sought to bring together all elements of climate-driven species redistribution.

Director of the Centre for Marine Socioecology and an ARC Future Fellow at the University of Tasmania's Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, Pecl had received money for an international workshop, but saw an opportunity to use it as seed funding for the conference. She will now co-convene the week-long 2019 event, held in Kruger National Park from July 22, with Rhodes University professor Warwick Sauer.

"We had lawyers and policymakers and people looking at communication with the public," she said. "We had geneticists working on the problem, or modelers and people looking at human diseases and veterinary diseases and how they were changing and shifting."

"I think it's kind of exciting that we started it here in Tassie and that's turned into a thing and created a bit of a community." A strong research community coming together in the face of a pervasive problem.

[Gauge on climate: Tasmania has warmed by about one degree in the past 100 years]

Pecl described it like this: one species could have connections to five - or 105 - others. With the movements now taking place, those existing connections are breaking up, and new connections are forming.

"It actually completely changes the way ecosystems function," she said. "It's an incredibly hard problem for us to try and understand: what's happening, how quickly it's happening, what the implications of that are, how to predict it in the future, how to address the implications of these changes."

Physiologists and geneticists need to understand what modelers need, who in turn need to know what policymakers need. "It's trying to get all of those groups to talk together and learn from each other."

Meanwhile, off Tasmania's East Coast, an entire habitat is changing.

A collision of conditions has seen sea surface temperatures rise roughly 2 degrees in the last 100 years - a rate almost four times the global average. The underlying warming boosted by a change in the usually more seasonal East Australian Current, now being pushed further along the coast for longer periods.

Fifteen per cent of intertidal species - barnacles and others living in the onshore area - have moved further south in the last 15 years. Since 1940, 85 per cent of seaweeds have, too.

"We've got at least several dozen new fish species and they are either things that have moved from north Tasmania to south, or from Victoria to Tasmania," Pecl said, all associated with increasing temperature.

The long-spined sea urchin (Centrostephanus rodgersii) is another. Common in Victoria and NSW, warming waters have allowed the species to creep south and, when warm enough, survive in large enough numbers to strip undersea plant material like kelp and sea grass from reefs, creating rocky barrens which impact abalone, rock lobsters and reef fish.

"That's an example of a species changing the whole habitat," Pecl said. And it's not just animal species. "There's new toxins and viruses turning up as well," she added, pointing to different paralytic toxins now appearing, along with Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome.

[Tasmanian Government to tackle the long-spined sea urchin]

Connected to the natural world as we are, humans, in our interactions with it, are not spared from the impacts of these intertwining changes either. A meeting of about 100 people at the Bicheno Community Hall in May aired ideas to recover rock lobster populations in the wake of the urchin move.

A commercial urchin harvest program launched by the Tasmanian Abalone Council is seeking to capitalise on the species' presence. More than one million have been collected by divers, helping establish a roe export industry while attempting to reduce their numbers.

Pecl said actions like these are a show of our adaptability. A recent paper, co-authored by Pecl and published by the journal Ambio in May, investigated the autonomous actions of marine-dependent people and groups already adjusting their behaviours on the state's East Coast.

But with warming already locked in for the next 40 years, adaption needs to take place alongside mitigation in the form of reduced carbon emissions, in addition to higher-level thinking about what conservation means to us as a society.

"Conservation means we draw a box around something and say we protect everything in the box .... But the things aren't staying inside the lines in the map," she said. "They're moving of their own accord in and out. When you have everything that lives on the planet changing where it lives, it means rethinking almost everything we do."

[Gauge on Climate: Climate Tasmania seeks bipartisan support for Act amendments]

Today's level of species movement extends well beyond any collective knowledge held by contemporary science. Which is why the longer memory of First Nations and Indigenous communities also needs to be listened to, Pecl said. And why this month's conference is attempting "two-eyed seeing" - recognising Indigenous knowledge as an entity to be retained alongside, rather than integrated into, Western science.

But if there's one message Pecl thinks is most important, it's this: being forewarned is being forearmed. Public and volunteer-run marine monitoring programs like REDMAP and Reef Life Survey provide a service, as do many other agencies across the state, country, and globe. Attempts to bring knowledge together across all communities - scientific or otherwise - touched by changes are important, too.

"I think the more information and knowledge that we have on what's changing and how quickly and how, then the better off everybody is," she said.

While you're with us, you can now sign up to receive breaking news updates and daily headlines direct to your inbox. Sign up here.