Environmental warming alters food-web structure and ecosystem function

Petchey, Owen L.; McPhearson, P. Timon; Casey, Timothy M.; Morin, Peter J.

doi:10.1038/47023

Cited by 736 publications

(801 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…This means that predator responses to change lag behind those of primary consumers. Increasing rates of biological change, such as those occurring due to climate change, might therefore alter food-web dynamics, favouring bottom-up forces, increasing biomass of basal groups such as plants, algae, and bacteria [57]. Food webs have already provided a conceptual framework for generating hypotheses on the effects of changing climate [58].…”

Section: Linking Individuals To Food Webs To Ecosystem Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Thompson

Brose

Dunne

et al. 2012

Trends in Ecology & Evolution

589

500

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The global biodiversity crisis concerns not only unprecedented loss of species within communities, but also related consequences for ecosystem function. Community ecology focuses on patterns of species richness and community composition, whereas ecosystem ecology focuses on fluxes of energy and materials. Food webs provide a quantitative framework to combine these approaches and unify the study of biodiversity and ecosystem function. We summarise the progression of foodweb ecology and the challenges in using the food-web approach. We identify five areas of research where these advances can continue, and be applied to global challenges. Finally, we describe what data are needed in the next generation of food-web studies to reconcile the structure and function of biodiversity.Reconciling the study of biodiversity and ecosystem function We are experiencing two interrelated global ecological crises. One is in biodiversity, with unprecedented rates of species loss across all major ecosystems, combined with greatly accelerated biotic exchange between landmasses [1]. Consequently, spatial and temporal patterns of species occurrence are being fundamentally altered by extinction and invasion. The second crisis concerns the regulation of ecological processes and the ecosystem services they provide. Processes such as primary production and nutrient cycling have been severely altered by human activities [1].Our understanding of biodiversity comes largely from a sound theoretical and empirical basis provided by community ecology, including core concepts such as niche segregation [2] and Island Biogeography [3,4]. Early studies of individual species' habitat preferences and physiological tolerances have been complemented by studies of interspecific interactions from field surveys and experiments. Applications such as conservation management depend largely on mapping of community patterns and studies of habitat occupancy and preferences. More recently, habitat models have been applied, and the advent of simple and cheap molecular markers has allowed quantification of important community assembly (see Glossary) processes such as dispersal [5]. In community ecology the unit of study is the individual, population, or species, consistent with other sub-disciplines such as behavioural and population biology. Review GlossaryAssembly: the set of processes by which a food web is rebuilt after disturbance or the creation of new habitat. Bioenergetics: the flow and transformation of energy in and between living organisms and between living organisms and their environment. Cascade model: a food-web model which assumes hierarchical feeding along a single niche axis, with each species allocated a probability of feeding on taxa below it in the hierarchy. Community web: a food web intended to include all species and trophic links that occur within a defined ecological community. 'Species' in this sense might involve various degrees of aggregation or division of biological species. Compartmentalisation: the property by which one subset of sp...

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Section: Linking Individuals To Food Webs To Ecosystem Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Thompson

Brose

Dunne

et al. 2012

Trends in Ecology & Evolution

589

500

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Petchey and coworkers (Petchey et al 1999;Petchey 2000) pioneered much of this field, by carrying out a series of experiments using protist assemblages in microcosms to study trajectories of community change and food web responses to experimental warming. Top predators and herbivores were disproportionately affected, assemblages became dominated by autotrophs and bacterivores, and ecosystem functioning was altered beyond the scale expected solely from predictions based on temperature-dependent physiological rates, owing to changes in the relative abundance of functional groups (Petchey et al 1999;Petchey 2000). Similarly, Dang et al (2009) have shown that warming alters the composition of fungal assemblages, thereby influencing rates of organic matter decomposition.…”

Section: Scales Of Study and Levels Of Biological Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, it has been suggested that rising temperatures might shift the size spectrum in local communities towards greater dominance by smaller organisms as large individuals are lost disproportionately (e.g. Petchey et al 1999), and this has important implication for freshwater food webs, which appear to be far more strongly sizestructured than their terrestrial counterparts Ings et al 2009). These fundamental energetic constraints on metabolism, behaviour, and the architecture and dynamics of trophic networks underpin many of the key points addressed in this review.…”

Section: Introduction: Climate Change and Levels Of Biological Organimentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change and freshwater ecosystems: impacts across multiple levels of organization

Woodward

Perkins

Brown

2010

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

1,047

767

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Fresh waters are particularly vulnerable to climate change because (i) many species within these fragmented habitats have limited abilities to disperse as the environment changes; (ii) water temperature and availability are climate-dependent; and (iii) many systems are already exposed to numerous anthropogenic stressors. Most climate change studies to date have focused on individuals or species populations, rather than the higher levels of organization (i.e. communities, food webs, ecosystems). We propose that an understanding of the connections between these different levels, which are all ultimately based on individuals, can help to develop a more coherent theoretical framework based on metabolic scaling, foraging theory and ecological stoichiometry, to predict the ecological consequences of climate change. For instance, individual basal metabolic rate scales with body size (which also constrains food web structure and dynamics) and temperature (which determines many ecosystem processes and key aspects of foraging behaviour). In addition, increasing atmospheric CO 2 is predicted to alter molar CNP ratios of detrital inputs, which could lead to profound shifts in the stoichiometry of elemental fluxes between consumers and resources at the base of the food web. The different components of climate change (e.g. temperature, hydrology and atmospheric composition) not only affect multiple levels of biological organization, but they may also interact with the many other stressors to which fresh waters are exposed, and future research needs to address these potentially important synergies.

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“…There is much scientific concern that the loss of living organisms will reduce the capacity of our ecosystems to provide important services (Ehrlich 1988;Walker 1992Walker , 1995Lawton & Brown 1993;Schulze & Mooney 1993;Kunin & Lawton 1996;Rapport et al 1998;Chapin et al 2000), or to counteract the effects of global climate change (Petchey et al 1999). A particular concern is that the consequences of species extinction on ecosystems may not be detected until conditions deteriorate beyond our ability to reverse the loss.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Protected areas as biodiversity benchmarks for human impact: agriculture and the Serengeti avifauna

Sinclair

Mduma

Arcese

2002

Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B

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Protected areas as biodiversity benchmarks allow a separation of the direct effects of human impact on biodiversity loss from those of other environmental changes. We illustrate the use of ecological baselines with a case from the Serengeti ecosystem, Tanzania. We document a substantial but previously unnoted loss of bird diversity in agriculture detected by reference to the immediately adjacent native vegetation in Serengeti. The abundance of species found in agriculture was only 28% of that for the same species in native savannah. Insectivorous species feeding in the grass layer or in trees were the most reduced. Some 50% of both insectivorous and granivorous species were not recorded in agriculture, with ground-feeding and tree species most affected. Grass-layer insect abundance and diversity was much reduced in agriculture, consistent with the loss of insectivorous birds. These results indicate that many species of birds will become confined to protected areas over time. We need to determine whether existing protected areas are sufficiently large to maintain viable populations of insectivorous birds likely to become confined to them. This study highlights the essential nature of baseline areas for assessing causes of change in humandominated systems and for developing innovative strategies to restore biodiversity.

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Environmental warming alters food-web structure and ecosystem function

Cited by 736 publications

References 22 publications

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Food webs: reconciling the structure and function of biodiversity

Climate change and freshwater ecosystems: impacts across multiple levels of organization

Protected areas as biodiversity benchmarks for human impact: agriculture and the Serengeti avifauna

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