Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 118, Issue 35, Pages -Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2019591118
Keywords
biodiversity-ecosystem functioning; climate change; marine phytoplankton; temperature variability; temperature fluctuation
Categories
Funding
- French Agence Nationale de la Recherche through LabEx TULIP [ANR-10-LABX-41]
- FRAGCLIM Consolidator Grant - European Research Council under the European Union [726176]
- European Research Council (ERC) [726176] Funding Source: European Research Council (ERC)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This research reveals that temperature fluctuations alter the importance of biodiversity for ecosystem functioning, with wider fluctuations exacerbating the negative impact of species loss on ecosystem functioning. Species-rich communities are able to maintain ecosystem functioning under climate change, while species-poor communities typically cannot.
The 21st century has seen an acceleration of anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss, with both stressors deemed to affect ecosystem functioning. However, we know little about the interactive effects of both stressors and in particular about the interaction of increased climatic variability and biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning. This should be remedied because larger climatic variability is one of the main features of climate change. Here, we demonstrated that temperature fluctuations led to changes in the importance of biodiversity for ecosystem functioning. We used microcosm communities of different phytoplankton species richness and exposed them to a constant, mild, and severe temperature-fluctuating environment. Wider temperature fluctuations led to steeper biodiversity-ecosystem functioning slopes, meaning that species loss had a stronger negative effect on ecosystem functioning in more fluctuating environments. For severe temperature fluctuations, the slope increased through time due to a decrease of the productivity of species-poor communities over time. We developed a theoretical competition model to better understand our experimental results and showed that larger differences in thermal tolerances across species led to steeper biodiversity- ecosystem functioning slopes. Species-rich communities maintained their ecosystem functioning with increased fluctuation as they contained species able to resist the thermally fluctuating environments, while this was on average not the case in species-poor communities. Our results highlight the importance of biodiversity for maintaining ecosystem functions and services in the context of increased climatic variability under climate change.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available