2017 ESA Annual Meeting (August 6 -- 11)

COS 147-5 - Warming decreases stability and productivity via changing species interactions

Thursday, August 10, 2017: 2:50 PM
B118-119, Oregon Convention Center
Frank Pennekamp1, Mikael Pontarp2, Andrea Tabi2, Roman Alther3, Florian Altermatt2, Yves Choffat2, Emanuel A. Fronhofer3, Pravin Ganesanandamoorthy4, Aurélie M. Garnier5, Suzanne Greene6, Katherine Horgan2, Thomas M. Massie2, Elvira Mächler3, Gian Marco Palamara7, Mathew Seymour8, Jason I. Griffiths9 and Owen L. Petchey2, (1)Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, (2)Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, (3)Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, (4)Department of Aquatic Ecology, 2Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, (5)Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, (6)Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (7)Institute of Evolutionary biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, (8)Aquatic Ecology, Eawag: Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Duebendorf, Switzerland, (9)University of Sheffield
Background/Question/Methods:

Climate change affects biodiversity on a global scale due to species extinctions, changes in species distributions and their phenology. However, we do not have a clear understanding how temperature will affect the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationship (B-EF). Temperature could affect both the point of saturation and the slope of the B-EF relationship but the effect of species identity, interactions and temperature on B-EF components like complementarity and selection is poorly understood. Here, we report the results of a large-scale microcosm experiment in which species richness and temperature were manipulated to understand changes in community productivity and stability.

Results/Conclusions:

Richness generally had a positive effect on biomass and stability while warming tended to decrease biomass and destabilize communities. Additive partitioning showed that complementarity had a larger effect than the selection effect and both increased with richness. In contrast, higher temperatures decreased the effect of richness on the complementarity and selection effects (lowering intercept and slope). Model selection showed that temperature dependent species interactions played a significant role in the changing B-EF relationship. All species pairs were negatively affected by temperature regarding net productivity effects. However, some species pairs benefitted from increased temperature in terms of stability, although the overall effect was negative too. Our results highlight that climate change can substantially decrease the function and services that natural ecosystems provide with potentially substantial negative effects for human-well being.