Climate change affects the distribution of diversity across marine food webs

• Published in: Global Change Biology
• Main Authors: Thompson, Murray S. A., Couce, Elena, Schratzberger, Michaela, Lynam, Christopher P.
• Other Authors: Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, European Commission
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2023
• Subjects: Northeast Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16881; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/gcb.16881

Abstract Many studies predict shifts in species distributions and community size composition in response to climate change, yet few have demonstrated how these changes will be distributed across marine food webs. We use Bayesian Additive Regression Trees to model how climate change will affect the habitat suitability of marine fish species across a range of body sizes and belonging to different feeding guilds, each with different habitat and feeding requirements in the northeast Atlantic shelf seas. Contrasting effects of climate change are predicted for feeding guilds, with spatially extensive decreases in the species richness of consumers lower in the food web (planktivores) but increases for those higher up (piscivores). Changing spatial patterns in predator–prey mass ratios and fish species size composition are also predicted for feeding guilds and across the fish assemblage. In combination, these changes could influence nutrient uptake and transformation, transfer efficiency and food web stability, and thus profoundly alter ecosystem structure and functioning.