Summary1. Plants use light as a source of both energy and information. Plant physiological responses to light, and interactions between plants and animals (such as herbivory and pollination), have evolved under a more or less stable regime of 24-h cycles of light and darkness, and, outside of the tropics, seasonal variation in day length. 2. The rapid spread of outdoor electric lighting across the globe over the past century has caused an unprecedented disruption to these natural light cycles. Artificial light is widespread in the environment, varying in intensity by several orders of magnitude from faint skyglow reflected from distant cities to direct illumination of urban and suburban vegetation. 3. In many cases, artificial light in the night-time environment is sufficiently bright to induce a physiological response in plants, affecting their phenology, growth form and resource allocation. The physiology, behaviour and ecology of herbivores and pollinators are also likely to be impacted by artificial light. Thus, understanding the ecological consequences of artificial light at night is critical to determine the full impact of human activity on ecosystems. 4. Synthesis. Understanding the impacts of artificial night-time light on wild plants and natural vegetation requires linking the knowledge gained from over a century of experimental research on the impacts of light on plants in the laboratory and glasshouse with knowledge of the intensity, spatial distribution, spectral composition and timing of light in the night-time environment. To understand fully the extent of these impacts requires conceptual models that can (i) characterize the highly heterogeneous nature of the night-time light environment at a scale relevant to plant physiology; and (ii) scale physiological responses to predict impacts at the level of the whole plant, population, community and ecosystem.
Artificial light at night has a wide range of biological effects on both plants and animals. Here, we review mechanisms by which artificial light at night may restructure ecological communities by modifying the interactions between species. Such mechanisms may be top-down (predator, parasite or grazer controlled), bottom-up (resource-controlled) or involve non-trophic processes, such as pollination, seed dispersal or competition. We present results from an experiment investigating both top-down and bottom-up effects of artificial light at night on the population density of pea aphids Acyrthosiphon pisum in a diverse artificial grassland community in the presence and absence of predators and under low-level light of different spectral composition. We found no evidence for top-down control of A. pisum in this system, but did find evidence for bottom-up effects mediated through the impact of light on flower head density in a leguminous food plant. These results suggest that physiological effects of light on a plant species within a diverse plant community can have detectable demographic effects on a specialist herbivore.
Abstract1. Human settlements and transport networks are growing rapidly worldwide. Since the early 20th century their expansion has been accompanied by increasing illumination of the environment at night, a trend that is likely to continue over the decades to come. Consequently, a growing proportion of the world's ecosystems are exposed to artificial light at night, profoundly altering natural cycles of light and darkness. While in recent years there have been advances in our understanding of the effects of artificial light at night on the behaviour and physiology of animals in the wild, much less is known about the impacts on wild plants and natural or seminatural vegetation composition. This is surprising, as effects of low-intensity light at night on flowering, phenology and growth form are well known in laboratory and greenhouse studies.2. In a long-term experimental field study we exposed a semi-natural grassland to artificial light at intensities and wavelengths typical of those experienced by roadside vegetation under street lighting.3. We found that lighting affected the trajectory of vegetation change, leading to significant differences in biomass and plant cover in the dominant species.4. Changes in flowering phenology were variable between years, with grass species flowering between 4 days earlier and 12 days later under artificial light. Policy implications.Our results demonstrate that artificial light, at levels equivalent to those in street-lit environments, can affect species composition in semi-natural vegetation. This highlights the importance of considering artificial light as a driver of vegetation change in urban, suburban and semi-natural ecosystems, and where possible, of minimising or excluding artificial light from habitats of conservation importance. K E Y W O R D Sartificial light,
Globally, many ecosystems are exposed to artificial light at night. Nighttime lighting has direct biological impacts on species at all trophic levels. However, the effects of artificial light on biotic interactions remain, for the most part, to be determined. We exposed experimental mesocosms containing combinations of grassland plants and invertebrate herbivores and predators to illumination at night over a 3‐year period to simulate conditions under different common forms of street lighting. We demonstrate both top‐down (predation‐controlled) and bottom‐up (resource‐controlled) impacts of artificial light at night in grassland communities. The impacts on invertebrate herbivore abundance were wavelength‐dependent and mediated via other trophic levels. White LED lighting decreased the abundance of a generalist herbivore mollusc by 55% in the presence of a visual predator, but not in its absence, while monochromatic amber light (with a peak wavelength similar to low‐pressure sodium lighting) decreased abundance of a specialist herbivore aphid (by 17%) by reducing the cover and flower abundance of its main food plant in the system. Artificial white light also significantly increased the food plant's foliar carbon to nitrogen ratio. We conclude that exposure to artificial light at night can trigger ecological effects spanning trophic levels, and that the nature of such impacts depends on the wavelengths emitted by the lighting technology employed. Policy implications. Our results confirm that artificial light at night, at illuminance levels similar to roadside vegetation, can have population effects mediated by both top‐down and bottom‐up effects on ecosystems. Given the increasing ubiquity of light pollution at night, these impacts may be widespread in the environment. These results underline the importance of minimizing ecosystem disruption by reducing light pollution in natural and seminatural ecosystems.
With climate change leading to poleward range expansion of species, populations are exposed to new daylength regimes along latitudinal gradients. Daylength is a major factor affecting insect life cycles and activity patterns, so a range shift leading to new daylength regimes is likely to affect population dynamics and species interactions; however, the impact of daylength in isolation on ecological communities has not been studied so far. Here, we tested for the direct and indirect effects of two different daylengths on the dynamics of experimental multitrophic insect communities. We compared the community dynamics under “southern” summer conditions of 14.5‐hr daylight to “northern” summer conditions of 22‐hr daylight. We show that food web dynamics indeed respond to daylength with one aphid species (Acyrthosiphon pisum) reaching much lower population sizes at the northern daylength regime compared to under southern conditions. In contrast, in the same communities, another aphid species (Megoura viciae) reached higher population densities under northern conditions. This effect at the aphid level was driven by an indirect effect of daylength causing a change in competitive interaction strengths, with the different aphid species being more competitive at different daylength regimes. Additionally, increasing daylength also increased growth rates in M. viciae making it more competitive under summer long days. As such, the shift in daylength affected aphid population sizes by both direct and indirect effects, propagating through species interactions. However, contrary to expectations, parasitoids were not affected by daylength. Our results demonstrate that range expansion of whole communities due to climate change can indeed change interaction strengths between species within ecological communities with consequences for community dynamics. This study provides the first evidence of daylength affecting community dynamics, which could not be predicted from studying single species separately.
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