Measuring the Response Diversity of Ecological Communities Experiencing Multifarious Environmental Change

Abstract

The diversity in organismal responses to environmental changes (i.e., response diversity) plays a crucial role in shaping community and ecosystem stability. However, existing measures of response diversity only consider a single environmental variable, whereas natural communities are commonly exposed to changes in multiple environmental variables simultaneously. Thus far, no approach exists to integrate multifarious environmental change and the measurement of response diversity. Here, we show how to consider and quantify response diversity in the context of multifarious environmental change, and in doing so introduce a distinction between response diversity to a defined or anticipated environmental change, and the response capacity to any possible set of (defined or undefined) future environmental changes. First, we describe and illustrate the concepts with empirical data. We reveal the role of the trajectory of environmental change in shaping response diversity when multiple environmental variables fluctuate over time. We show that, when the trajectory of the environmental change is undefined (i.e., there is no information or a priori expectation about how an environmental condition will change in future), we can quantify the response capacity of a community to any possible environmental change scenario. That is, we can estimate the capacity of a system to respond under a range of realistic or extreme environmental changes, with utility for predicting future responses to even multifarious environmental change. Finally, we investigate determinants of response diversity within a multifarious environmental change context. We identify factors such as the diversity of species responses to each environmental variable, the relative influence of different environmental variables and temporal means of environmental variable values as important determinants of response diversity. In doing so, we take an important step towards measuring and understanding the insurance capacity of ecological communities exposed to multifarious environmental change.