Cross-taxa generalities in the relationship between population abundance and ambient temperatures

Abstract

Identifying patterns in the effects of temperature on species' population abundances could help develop a general framework for predicting the consequences of climate change across different communities and realms. We used long-term population time series data from terrestrial, freshwater, and marine species communities within central Europe to compare the effects of temperature on abundance across a broad range of taxonomic groups. We asked whether there was an average relationship between temperatures in different seasons and annual abundances of species in a community, and whether species attributes (temperature range of distribution, range size, habitat breadth, dispersal ability, body size, and lifespan) explained interspecific variation in the relationship between temperature and abundance. We found that, on average, warmer winter temperatures were associated with greater abundances in terrestrial communities (ground beetles, spiders, and birds) but not always in aquatic communities (freshwater and marine invertebrates and fish). The abundances of species with large geographical ranges, larger body sizes, and longer lifespans tended to be less related to temperature. Our results suggest that climate change may have, in general, positive effects on species' abundances within many terrestrial communities in central Europe while the effects are less predictable in aquatic communities.

Insects and recent climate change

“…Rising minimum temperatures in particular seasons might impact insects through effects on critical overwintering and diapausing stages. In central Europe, warmer overwintering temperature is associated with increased abundance in the following year for terrestrial organisms in a largescale study that included insects (34). In the United Kingdom, the annual population dynamics of moths are affected by overwintering temperature and precipitation (35).…”

“…In previous periods of change, we know from the paleontological record that individual beetles have relocated across continents (70), and distributional change is a commonly observed response among insects today (47). Some of the studies from Table 1 discuss traits that predict positive or negative responses to climate change, including whether an insect is terrestrial or aquatic (24,34), its trophic position (14,28,29,68,71), its functional group (14,28,36), and its voltinism (33,42,(72)(73)(74). Many of these studies find support for greater climate sensitivity in higher trophic levels and positive responses to warming for multivoltine species (relative to univoltine species); however, as can be seen from the case study (Fig.…”

Variations in fecundity over catchment scales: Implications for caddisfly populations spanning a thermal gradient

“…Nevertheless, these results and others that focus on populations (e.g. Bowler et al, 2017) emphasize that climate change may act more subtly than range shifts of cold-adapted species. (129)…”

A quantitative review of abundance-based species distribution models

“…Effects of species characteristics in abundance-based models may differ from occurrence-based models. Differences could arise because species abundance is jointly determined by fundamental niche axes in addition to dynamic population properties (Peterson et al 2011), such as the strength of negative density dependence, intrinsic population growth rates and population cycles (Chisholm and Muller-Landau 2011, Yañez-Arenas et al 2014b, Chu et al 2016, Bowler et al 2017, Yenni et al 2017, Hallett et al 2018). Fundamental niche limits are expected to play a small role in controlling abundance of wide-ranging species, because these species have their abundance controlled by a milieu of demographic factors that may each have different response functions (Hallett et al 2018), perhaps leading to lower performance.…”