Climate Change and the Past, Present, and Future of Biotic Interactions

Abstract

Biotic interactions drive key ecological and evolutionary processes and mediate ecosystem responses to climate change. The direction, frequency, and intensity of biotic interactions can in turn be altered by climate change. Understanding the complex interplay between climate and biotic interactions is thus essential for fully anticipating how ecosystems will respond to the fast rates of current warming, which are unprecedented since the end of the last glacial period. We highlight episodes of climate change that have disrupted ecosystems and trophic interactions over time scales ranging from years to millennia by changing species' relative abundances and geographic ranges, causing extinctions, and creating transient and novel communities dominated by generalist species and interactions. These patterns emerge repeatedly across disparate temporal and spatial scales, suggesting the possibility of similar underlying processes. Based on these findings, we identify knowledge gaps and fruitful areas for research that will further our understanding of the effects of climate change on ecosystems.

Amplified plant turnover in response to climate change forecast by Late Quaternary records

“…Moreover, novel and integrative research routes are much needed to include species historical responses to climate change, including those imprinted in the genes of extant and extinct species 28 . Many challenges remain to accurately predicting the future of ecological species and communities 29 , including species interactions under climate change 30 , but the long-term paleoecological record and paleoclimatic data are one vital component to enhancing the robustness of predicted dynamics and better-grounded recommendations for conservation policies.…”

The Neotoma Paleoecology Database, a multiproxy, international, community-curated data resource

“…Dynamics at one location are often interpretable only in the context of larger-scale biogeographic and climatic processes Williams et al, 2004), and ecosystems can be affected by slow processes that were triggered by events centuries or even millennia ago (Svenning and Sandel, 2013;Goring and Williams, 2017). Networks of paleoecological records, therefore, provide fundamental scientific infrastructure for understanding the responses of species to large and abrupt environmental changes, the mechanisms that promote resilience, and the interplay between climatic and biotic interactions (Dawson et al, 2011;Blois et al, 2013;Moritz and Agudo, 2013;Jackson and Blois, 2015). Examples include the processes controlling contemporary and past patterns of community, species, and genetic diversity (Fritz et al, 2013;Blarquez et al, 2014;De La Torre et al, 2014;Gutiérrez-García et al, 2014;Sandom et al, 2014;Cinget et al, 2015;Jezkova et al, 2015); identification of species refugia (Bennett and Provan, 2008;Gavin et al, 2014;Vickers and Buckland, 2015); rates of species expansion (Ordonez and Williams, 2013;Giesecke et al, 2017); the reshuffling of species into no-analog communities during climate change (Graham et al, 1996;Radeloff et al, 2015;Finsinger et al, 2017); the timing and patterns of abrupt ecological and climate change (Shuman et al, 2009;Seddon et al, 2015); quantification of the time lags between abrupt climate change and local ecological response (Ammann et al, 2013;Birks, 2015); and the timing, causes, and consequences of late Quaternary megafaunal extinctions (Lorenzen et al, 2011;Doughty et al, 2013;Emery-Wetherell et al, 2017).…”

Long-term empirical evidence of ocean warming leading to tropicalization of fish communities, increased herbivory, and loss of kelp

“…A recent metaanalysis of long-term datasets (>20 y) from terrestrial and freshwater environments, however, shows that climate-mediated alterations to species interactions can be more important than the direct effects of temperature (2). Indeed, novel species interactions following species distribution shifts have already underpinned some of the most profound community-level impacts of climate change in the past (3) and are likely to underpin them in the future (4,5). There is therefore an urgent need to better understand shifting species interactions to adequately predict the impacts of climate change.…”