Reorganization of an arid ecosystem in response to recent climate change

Brown, James H.; Valone, Thomas J.; Curtin, Charles G.

doi:10.1073/pnas.94.18.9729

Cited by 398 publications

(348 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…However, the expected overall decrease in water availability under global change is likely to promote higher competition among vascular plants, stronger herbivory effects on plants and more intense predator-prey interactions (see [61] for a review). Such responses may cascade throughout the whole ecosystem, ultimately promoting shifts in the structure and composition of dryland communities [69].…”

Section: Global Environmental Change Effects On Drylandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Maestre

Salguero‐Gómez

Quero

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

271

209

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Drylands occupy large portions of the Earth, and are a key terrestrial biome from the socio-ecological point of view. In spite of their extent and importance, the impacts of global environmental change on them remain poorly understood. In this introduction, we review some of the main expected impacts of global change in drylands, quantify research efforts on the topic, and highlight how the articles included in this theme issue contribute to fill current gaps in our knowledge. Our literature analyses identify key under-studied areas that need more research (e.g. countries such as Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Somalia, and deserts such as the Thar, Kavir and Taklamakan), and indicate that most global change research carried out to date in drylands has been done on a unidisciplinary basis. The contributions included here use a wide array of organisms (from micro-organisms to humans), spatial scales (from local to global) and topics (from plant demography to poverty alleviation) to examine key issues to the socio-ecological impacts of global change in drylands. These papers highlight the complexities and difficulties associated with the prediction of such impacts. They also identify the increased use of long-term experiments and multidisciplinary approaches as priority areas for future dryland research. Major advances in our ability to predict and understand global change impacts on drylands can be achieved by explicitly considering how the responses of individuals, populations and communities will in turn affect ecosystem services. Future research should explore linkages between these responses and their effects on water and climate, as well as the provisioning of services for human development and well-being.

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Section: Global Environmental Change Effects On Drylandsmentioning

confidence: 99%

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Maestre

Salguero‐Gómez

Quero

2012

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

271

209

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“…The evolution of terrestrial life has been driven by the challenge of maintaining water balance with scarce freshwater resources, but effects of animal water limitation on terrestrial food webs have received little attention, in contrast to plant-mediated bottom-up effects [1,[2][3][4][5]. This is a significant gap in our understanding of ecological dynamics, because over 40% of the earth's land surface is classified as drylands [6] and precipitation limits diversity of plants and animals at all but the highest latitudes globally, even outside of drylands [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Animal water balance drives top-down effects in a riparian forest—implications for terrestrial trophic cascades

McCluney

Sabo

2016

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Despite the clear importance of water balance to the evolution of terrestrial life, much remains unknown about the effects of animal water balance on food webs. Based on recent research suggesting animal water imbalance can increase trophic interaction strengths in cages, we hypothesized that water availability could drive top-down effects in open environments, influencing the occurrence of trophic cascades. We manipulated large spider abundance and water availability in 20 Â 20 m open-air plots in a streamside forest in Arizona, USA, and measured changes in cricket and small spider abundance and leaf damage. As expected, large spiders reduced both cricket abundance and herbivory under ambient, dry conditions, but not where free water was added. When water was added (free or within moist leaves), cricket abundance was unaffected by large spiders, but spiders still altered herbivory, suggesting behavioural effects. Moreover, we found thresholdtype increases in herbivory at moderately low soil moisture (between 5.5% and 7% by volume), suggesting the possibility that water balance may commonly influence top-down effects. Overall, our results point towards animal water balance as an important driver of direct and indirect species interactions and food web dynamics in terrestrial ecosystems.

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“…In a 8-yr long continuous period of worker based ant monitoring in the same habitat, we collected a total of 454248 ant workers with 70 pitfall traps between 1981 and 1988 (Gallé et al unpublished) and the all-population between-year CV was 0.54, much greater than in the present study, based on ant nests (0.18). Papers based on colony counting (Chew 1995, Chew and De Vita 1980, Keeler 1993, Brown et al 1997, Klimetzek 1981, Gallé Klimetzek et al 2013, however, described fluctuations of similar or even smaller magnitude in different habitats.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change impoverishes and homogenizes ants’ community structure: a long term study

Gallé

2017

Community Ecology

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Climate change brings along trend-like changes as well as changes in the temporal variations in environmental conditions which interact with the biological dynamics of ecological systems. Therefore, only studies covering several decades may unveil long term trends in ecological systems, such as in animal communities. To demonstrate if recent climatic changes have caused fundamental changes in the structure of a key arthropod community, I studied the long-term dynamics of ant colonies for 37 years on a sandy grassland in central Hungary. To be able to monitor colonies -the natural units of ant communities -with the possible least disturbance, I applied two grids of a total of 80 slate plates as artificial nesting sites. Prior to the presented study, a well-defined spatial ant community structure had been identified in the studied habitat, which consisted of three species groups (dune top, transitional and dune slack groups), occupying different habitat patches. During the study period 2813 nests of 11 ant species were recorded under the slates. Over the 37 years, community pattern markedly changed, dune slack species disappeared from the studied plots, while the frequency of drought-tolerant dune top species increased by a significant trend. No significant trend was observed in the case of the transitional species group. On the species population level, two species, Lasius niger and Formica cunicularia, showed an intensive population decline; while the Plagiolepis taurica population significantly increased and spatially joined the transitional species group in the dune slack in the second half of the project. These changes led to a major decline in species richness and a homogenization of species composition across habitat patches. Multiple correlation analyses revealed that the depletion of groundwater had the strongest relationship with these population trends. The study indicates that climate change can be linked to a fundamental change in the community structure of major ecosystem actors.

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Reorganization of an arid ecosystem in response to recent climate change

Cited by 398 publications

References 35 publications

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

It is getting hotter in here: determining and projecting the impacts of global environmental change on drylands

Animal water balance drives top-down effects in a riparian forest—implications for terrestrial trophic cascades

Climate change impoverishes and homogenizes ants’ community structure: a long term study

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