Hypothetical populations of aquatic insects were periodically sampled, using a computer model, to estimate production by the instantaneous‐growth, removal‐summation, and Hynes/Hamilton methods. These estimates were compared with the production values calculated from the daily growth of all individuals in the populations. The removal‐summation method yielded the most accurate estimates for a variety of growth curves and sampling regimes and appeared to be the least sensitive to violations of the growth assumptions of the method.

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the science in estimating potential effects of climate change on the human environment. The paper provides a n overview of the state of effects research and outlines the analyses required in order to make adaptive policy. It compares approaches that have been taken for measuring the human consequences of climate change, and outlines the results of climate change impact studies that have been performed both on individual sectors and entire regions. The paper also discusses both the results of studies of historical environmental changes that serve as analogs for potential future climate change and the major sources of uncertainty. The paper concludes with a summary of effects, knowns and unknowns, and directions for future research. In general, future effects research needs to be targeted on regions rather than individual resources; it must take the timing of resource effects and technological change explicitly into account; and it must dlrectly address uncertainty using new and more efficient computational techniques, as opposed to brute-force Monte Carlo estimation.