From projected species distribution to food‐web structure under climate change

Abstract

Climate change is inducing deep modifications in species geographic ranges worldwide. However, the consequences of such changes on community structure are still poorly understood, particularly the impacts on food-web properties. Here, we propose a new framework, coupling species distribution and trophic models, to predict climate change impacts on food-web structure across the Mediterranean Sea. Sea surface temperature was used to determine the fish climate niches and their future distributions. Body size was used to infer trophic interactions between fish species. Our projections reveal that 54 fish species of 256 endemic and native species included in our analysis would disappear by 2080-2099 from the Mediterranean continental shelf. The number of feeding links between fish species would decrease on 73.4% of the continental shelf. However, the connectance of the overall fish web would increase on average, from 0.26 to 0.29, mainly due to a differential loss rate of feeding links and species richness. This result masks a systematic decrease in predator generality, estimated here as the number of prey species, from 30.0 to 25.4. Therefore, our study highlights large-scale impacts of climate change on marine food-web structure with potential deep consequences on ecosystem functioning. However, these impacts will likely be highly heterogeneous in space, challenging our current understanding of climate change impact on local marine ecosystems.

Mare Incognitum: A Glimpse into Future Plankton Diversity and Ecology Research

“…Recently, the exploration of the plankton "interactome" (Lima-Mendez et al, 2015) allowed to describe how biotic interactions occur across trophic levels and relate to environmental conditions and ecosystem functioning, with many new symbiotic interactions identified (Guidi et al, 2016). When prior knowledge is too limited, food-web models could be inferred from simple size-based, or multi-traits assumptions (Albouy et al, 2014), or based on ecosystem models (e.g., Follows et al, 2007;Le Quéré et al, 2016) in combination with satellite estimates of (phyto)plankton community composition (e.g., Hirata et al, 2011).…”

Temperature alters food web body-size structure

“…Thus, to actually change the body-size structure of food webs, warming must have a differential effect on predator and prey size, with predators becoming smaller at a faster pace than their prey. There is yet to be any experimental evidence suggesting that this can happen in nature, although this pattern can be obtained through a differential effect of warming in predator and prey mobility [1], which has been in turn shown to greatly affect food web network structure [25,26].…”

“…The link between temperature and body-size structure might be related to species identity across habitats, to differences in the way prey selection occurs between species of different habitats [3] or to range shifts with temperature [1,26]. Finally, it can also be due to body size changes of species occurring in different habitats due to differences in environmental temperatures [14,16,24].…”

An updated synthesis of the observed and projected impacts of climate change on the chemical, physical and biological processes in the oceans

“…As different species and groups have differential responses to warming, effects are seen at every trophic level and can also be amplified up the food chain (Pinsky et al, 2013;Chust et al, 2014). Changes in phenology are not synchronous among phyla and can cause predator-prey mismatches (Arula et al, 2014;Behrenfeld, 2014;Lewandowska et al, 2014), changes to species compositions (Albouy et al, 2014), alterations in food web body size (Gibert and Delong, 2014) and changes in food web composition (Verges et al, 2014). Recent work has suggested that this maybe most pronounced in systems governed by seasonal blooms (Behrenfeld, 2014).…”