Predicting future coexistence in a North American ant community

Abstract

Global climate change will remodel ecological communities worldwide. However, as a consequence of biotic interactions, communities may respond to climate change in idiosyncratic ways. This makes predictive models that incorporate biotic interactions necessary. We show how such models can be constructed based on empirical studies in combination with predictions or assumptions regarding the abiotic consequences of climate change. Specifically, we consider a well-studied ant community in North America. First, we use historical data to parameterize a basic model for species coexistence. Using this model, we determine the importance of various factors, including thermal niches, food discovery rates, and food removal rates, to historical species coexistence. We then extend the model to predict how the community will restructure in response to several climate-related changes, such as increased temperature, shifts in species phenology, and altered resource availability. Interestingly, our mechanistic model suggests that increased temperature and shifts in species phenology can have contrasting effects. Nevertheless, for almost all scenarios considered, we find that the most subordinate ant species suffers most as a result of climate change. More generally, our analysis shows that community composition can respond to climate warming in nonintuitive ways. For example, in the context of a community, it is not necessarily the most heat-sensitive species that are most at risk. Our results demonstrate how models that account for niche partitioning and interspecific trade-offs among species can be used to predict the likely idiosyncratic responses of local communities to climate change.

Beyond thermal limits: comprehensive metrics of performance identify key axes of thermal adaptation in ants

“…We found support for this based on a comparison of CT max and activity season among six species from a single site in North Carolina: species whose foragers had a higher CT max were active for a shorter period of the year. A previous study also found that A. rudis had a relatively long activity season compared with two other co-occurring species (Bewick et al 2014).…”

“…A previous study also found that A. rudis had a relatively long activity season compared with two other co‐occurring species (Bewick et al . ).…”

Effect of habitat degradation on competition, carrying capacity, and species assemblage stability

“…At the location scale, the net effect of competition (Basset & Rossi, ; Lawlor, ) was to increase species assemblage stability, mitigating the negative effect of habitat degradation. Indirect responses mediated by species interactions have the potential to exceed the direct effect of environmental changes at both population and community levels, leading to disturbance propagation or attenuation within the community (Bewick et al., ; Montoya et al., ). Here, the net effect of species interactions was to reverse the outcomes of competition on population dynamics and stabilize communities (Lawlor, ; Montoya et al., ).…”

DraftAphaenogastergenomes expand our view of ant genome size variation across climate gradients

“…Further work investigating the variation in genomic content and mapping of target coding regions from previous physiological (Nguyen et al, 2017), biochemical (Helms Cahan et al, 2017), and transcriptomic (Stanton-Geddes et al, 2016) studies of Aphaenogaster and other ant species will inform predictions of how these species, and the ecosystems that they inhabit, may respond to ongoing climatic change. For instance, determining the genomic factors underlying the temperature response of ant assemblages to climatic gradients (Warren and Chick, 2013; Diamond et al, 2016, 2017) could provide useful insights into the response of these important organisms to non-analog ecosystem states and idiosyncratic community responses (Bewick et al, 2014). In addition, as species distribution models have been significantly improved by the inclusion of genetic information (Ikeda et al, 2016), an ecological genetics approach that couples ant genomic and ecologically relevant data will provide a useful window into the response of many terrestrial ecosystems to a changing climate.…”