Cascading effects of climate change on plankton community structure

Abstract

Plankton communities account for at least half of global primary production and play a key role in the global carbon cycle. Warming and acidification may alter the interaction chains in these communities from the bottom and top of the food web. Yet, the relative importance of these potentially complex interactions has not yet been quantified. Here, we examine the isolated and combined effects of warming, acidification, and reductions in phytoplankton and predator abundances in a series of factorial experiments. We find that warming directly impacts the top of the food web, but that the intermediate trophic groups are more strongly influenced by indirect effects mediated by altered top‐down interactions. Direct manipulations of predator and phytoplankton abundance reveal similar strong top‐down interactions following top predator decline. A meta‐analysis of published experiments further supports the conclusion that warming has stronger direct impacts on the top and bottom of the food web rather than the intermediate trophic groups, with important differences between freshwater and marine plankton communities. Our results reveal that the trophic effect of warming cascading down from the top of the plankton food web is a powerful agent of global change.

Environmental vulnerability of the global ocean plankton community interactome

“…For the Eukaryotic taxonomic profiling, we used the same methodology as in (50) to define OTUs using 18S rRNA gene V9 amplicons with the Swarm2 algorithm (91), with an updated version of the PR2 reference database (3). 18S rRNA gene V9 region PCR primers also amplify some 16S rRNA gene V9, thus we decided to filter out prokaryotic OTUs in the Eukaryote data that had been assigned to the following taxonomic groups: 'Bacteria' (35,448), 'nan' (31,406), 'Archaea' (1,806), 'root' (58) and 'Organelle' (583). For the prokaryotic abundance matrix, we filtered out miTags assigned to 'Eukaryota' (5,283), Chloroplast (468) and Mitochondria (74).…”

“…connectivity) relating to ecological characteristics of the community ( 28 ), which can serve as proxies of ecosystem and community-level resilience ( 29 ). Given that biotic interactions can influence species distributions at macroecological scales ( 30 ), and that climate change may cause trophic cascading effects on plankton community structure by directly impacting the top and bottom of marine food webs ( 31 ), ecological interactions need to be considered for assessing plankton community stability under climate change scenarios.…”

Intersecting Ecosystem Services Across the Aquatic Continuum: From Global Change Impacts to Local, and Biologically Driven, Synergies and Trade-Offs

“…Climate change, the main topic in one-fourth of the sea-ocean papers and one-sixth of the river-lake papers, was a significant driver of the correlations mentioned above. This result is not surprising: climate-change research increased globally in the 2000s' (Haunschild et al, 2016), as global warming can affect all "waters" and the services they provide (Downing, 2014;Callaghan et al, 2020), for instance by impacting primary production (e.g., O'Beirne et al, 2017;D'Alelio et al, 2020) and food webs (Murphy et al, 2020).…”

Spatial Distribution of Plankton in Response to Ecological Dynamics in Tropical Shallow Lakes: Insight from Lake Malombe, Malawi

“…In regions where seasonality is very distinct, variation in environmental factors plays a major role in plankton composition and distribution via the in uence of light and nutrients concentrations (Liu et al 2010;Vidal et al 2017). Different researchers have extensively studied the plankton composition and structure in both freshwater and marine environment (Boyce et al 2010;Borics et al 2021;Murphy et al 2020). These researchers have concluded that the dynamic changes of plankton in terms of genera richness, diversity, and density are instigated by the ecological changes of the lake.…”