Predicting resilience of ecosystem functioning from co‐varying species' responses to environmental change

Abstract

Understanding how environmental change affects ecosystem function delivery is of primary importance for fundamental and applied ecology. Current approaches focus on single environmental driver effects on communities, mediated by individual response traits. Data limitations present constraints in scaling up this approach to predict the impacts of multivariate environmental change on ecosystem functioning.We present a more holistic approach to determine ecosystem function resilience, using long‐term monitoring data to analyze the aggregate impact of multiple historic environmental drivers on species' population dynamics. By assessing covariation in population dynamics between pairs of species, we identify which species respond most synchronously to environmental change and allocate species into “response guilds.” We then use “production functions” combining trait data to estimate the relative roles of species to ecosystem functions. We quantify the correlation between response guilds and production functions, assessing the resilience of ecosystem functioning to environmental change, with asynchronous dynamics of species in the same functional guild expected to lead to more stable ecosystem functioning.Testing this method using data for butterflies collected over four decades in the United Kingdom, we find three ecosystem functions (resource provisioning, wildflower pollination, and aesthetic cultural value) appear relatively robust, with functionally important species dispersed across response guilds, suggesting more stable ecosystem functioning. Additionally, by relating genetic distances to response guilds we assess the heritability of responses to environmental change. Our results suggest it may be feasible to infer population responses of butterflies to environmental change based on phylogeny—a useful insight for conservation management of rare species with limited population monitoring data.Our approach holds promise for overcoming the impasse in predicting the responses of ecosystem functions to environmental change. Quantifying co‐varying species' responses to multivariate environmental change should enable us to significantly advance our predictions of ecosystem function resilience and enable proactive ecosystem management.

Abundance trends for river macroinvertebrates vary across taxa, trophic group and river typology

“…Ecosystem functions and services are often disproportionately driven by the abundance of common species (Larsen et al, 2018 ; Winfree et al, 2015 ), and so monitoring population and group‐level changes of macroinvertebrate abundance—instead of occurrence, which is more sensitive to rare and vulnerable species—can ultimately contribute to a more detailed understanding of ecosystem function (Greenwell et al, 2019 ). Freshwater macroinvertebrates support a number of different ecosystem functions and services (Macadam & Stockan, 2015 ), but namely they constitute the bulk of the diet of many fish, bird and bat species, including some rare and protected species in England such as the Daubenton's bat ( Myotis daubentonii ) and the Eurasian Dipper ( Cinclus cinclus ), whose diet is largely made up of Trichoptera.…”

Asynchrony in terrestrial insect abundance corresponds with species traits

“…To align methodology for predicting bumblebee annual abundance indices with the GAI methods used for the UKBMS and RIS data, we used the 'rbms' package in R to fit the required GAI models to each bumblebee species recorded with a sufficient number of observations from the BeeWalk data (Schmucki et al, 2022). We then calculated relative interannual abundance change values for each species by subtracting the collated annual abundance index for each year from the following year's value, creating a dataset of the annual changes in each species standardised log abundance, following the methodology for calculating relative interannual abundance change outlined in Greenwell et al (2019).…”

Mechanisms underpinning community stability along a latitudinal gradient: Insights from a niche‐based approach

“…Butterflies are some of the best-studied insect groups and show evidence of declines in Europe (Warren et al, 2021) and North America (Forister et al, 2021). In the short term, reductions in community stability through lower species richness and/or mean abundance may result in fluctuations in ecosystem function (Greenwell et al, 2019) and over the longer-term reductions in mean functional provision (Weise et al, 2020). Consequently, identifying the drivers influencing community stability is likely to improve the effectiveness of environmental management.…”