Resident species, not immigrants, drive reorganization of estuarine fish assemblages in response to warming

Abstract

Climate change is reshaping biological communities, as species track environmental temperature. Assemblage reorganization is underpinned by shifts in species abundance and distribution, but studies often focus on documenting compositional turnover. As a consequence, phenomena such as the tropicalization of temperate communities have been widely associated with increased occupancy of warm‐affinity species. Abundance‐weighted change in thermal affinity can be tracked with the Community Temperature Index (CTI), and decomposed into four processes: tropicalization (increasing warm‐affinity), borealization (increasing cold‐affinity), deborealization (decreasing cold‐affinity), and detropicalization (decreasing warm‐affinity). Further evaluation of these processes according to species persistence (i.e., immigrant, emigrant, and resident) may provide insights on whether novel communities emerge primarily from local shifts in species abundance or distribution. Using long‐term data on fish assemblages undergoing climate change's effects across 19 temperate estuaries surveyed for at least 20 years, we hypothesized (1) deborealization is the main process reshaping communities under climate change, and (2) the contribution of resident species to processes reshaping communities surpass the ones from immigrants and emigrants. Community dissimilarity was calculated through the Temporal Beta Index (TBI), which was further decomposed into species and individual losses and gains. These values were then used as effect sizes in the meta‐analyses performed to detect systematic trends in assemblage reorganization in response to climate change. We also calculated CTI and the strength of temperature‐related processes for resident, immigrant and emigrant species. Species and individual gains outweighed losses in estuaries. Temperature was correlated with changes in species abundance, but not occurrence. Fish abundance decreased with warming, and initially cooler estuaries gained more fish than warmer ones. Novel communities were shaped by a variety of processes, but mainly tropicalization. Assemblage reorganization was primarily driven by shifts in abundance of resident species with distinct thermal affinities, while contributions of arriving and exiting species played a secondary role. These findings reveal that novel communities are drawn primarily from the local species pool, due to changes in climate‐related drivers that favor distinct resident species.