Trait‐mediated responses to aridity and experimental drought by springtail communities across Europe

Abstract

1. The capacity to forecast the effects of climate change on biodiversity largely relies on identifying traits capturing mechanistic relationships with the environment through standardized field experiments distributed across relevant spatial scales. The effects of short-term experimental manipulations on local communities may overlap with regional climate gradients that have been operating during longer time periods. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies simultaneously assessing such long-term macroecological drivers with local climate manipulations.2. We analysed this issue with springtails (Class Collembola), one of the dominant soil fauna groups, in a standardized climate manipulation experiment conducted across six European countries encompassing broad climate gradients. We combined community data (near 20K specimens classified into 102 species) with 22 eco-morphological traits and reconstructed their phylogenetic relationships to track the evolution of adaptations to live at different soil depths, which is key to cope with desiccation. We then applied joint species distribution models to investigate the combined effect of the regional aridity gradient with the local experimental treatment (drought and warming) over the assembly of springtail communities and tested for significant trait-environment relationships mediating their community-level responses.

Animal functional traits: Towards a trait‐based ecology for whole ecosystems

“…Recent progress in the availability of global trait datasets (Griffith et al, 2023; Pincheira‐Donoso et al, 2023; Tobias et al, 2022) provides the basis for testing long‐standing questions on global biodiversity patterns with trait‐based approaches. Many of the studies included in this Special Focus worked on large spatial scales across elevational (Drag et al, 2023) and latitudinal gradients (Ferrín et al, 2023; Ibarra‐Isassi et al, 2023; Srivastava et al, 2023), or even covered the entire globe (Ali et al, 2023; Crouch & Jablonski, 2023; Pincheira‐Donoso et al, 2023). Importantly, these large‐scale analyses are no longer restricted to vertebrates (Etard et al, 2020), but are now also possible for many invertebrate groups including ants, beetles, springtails and aquatic macroinvertebrates.…”

“…First, large‐scale studies provide broad environmental gradients and help to detect previously unknown associations between functional traits and environmental conditions. For instance, this has enabled the identification of functional traits mediating springtail responses to aridity and drought (Ferrín et al, 2023) or mechanisms of species sorting according to ant functional traits across forest biomes (Ibarra‐Isassi et al, 2023). Second, and even more important, large‐scale analyses of trait diversity can be used to test macroecological theory (Lamanna et al, 2014) and assembly rules of ecological communities and networks (Marjakangas et al, 2022).…”

“…As expected, the findings of such empirical studies are not as straightforward as theory would predict and show that patterns in trait diversity and trait matching across trophic levels are contingent on the biogeographical context (Dalsgaard et al, 2021; Srivastava et al, 2023). As a consequence of such contingencies, macroecological trends and small‐scale community responses to changing environmental conditions can be disconnected (Ferrín et al, 2023). Nevertheless, adding functional traits to large‐scale analyses of ecological networks generally outperforms the predictive power of analyses merely based on taxonomic entities (Dehling et al, 2021).…”

“…As a prime example, trait‐based ecology has gathered ample evidence that the downsizing of ecological communities by the selective extinction of the largest organisms and their functional traits reduces ecosystem functioning (Dirzo et al, 2014; Enquist et al, 2020; Fricke et al, 2022). The studies in this Special Focus demonstrate that the step from species‐level to ecosystem‐level understanding can now principally be taken for many types of ecosystem functions, such as litter and wood decomposition by springtails and beetles (Drag et al, 2023; Ferrín et al, 2023), pollination and seed predation by birds and insects (Neu et al, 2023), or avian seed dispersal and arthropod predation (Peña et al, 2023). Taking this step by means of trait‐based analyses enables ecologists to predict global‐change impacts on ecosystem functioning and contributes key knowledge to ecosystem and conservation management.…”

Habitat connectivity buffers extinction under extreme droughts in experimental metapopulations

“…Species are expected to seek new habitats when natal habitats deteriorate. Field studies showed that Collembola have a high dispersal ability for new habitats when experiencing dry conditions (e.g., Ferrin et al 2022). Consequently, increasing movement between habitats may save populations from local extinction when patches experience inhospitable environmental conditions.…”