Data from: Diversity in thermal affinity among key piscivores buffers impacts of ocean warming on predator-prey interactions ...

• Main Authors: Selden, Rebecca L., Batt, Ryan D., Saba, Vincent S., Pinsky, Malin L.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2018
• Subjects: Urophycis tenuis; Scomber scombrus; Merluccius bilinearis; Squalus acanthias; Loligo pealeii; Marine; future projections under a doubling of carbon dioxide; Clupea harengus; 1969-present; Ammodytes dubius; atlantic cod; spiny dogfish
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.761tj; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.761tj

Asymmetries in responses to climate change have the potential to alter important predator-prey interactions, in part by altering the location and size of spatial refugia for prey. We evaluated the effect of ocean warming on interactions between four important piscivores and four of their prey in the U.S. Northeast Shelf by examining species overlap under historical conditions (1968-2014) and with a doubling in CO2. Because both predator and prey shift their distributions in response to changing ocean conditions, the net impact of warming or cooling on predator-prey interactions was not determined a priori from the range extent of either predator or prey alone. For Atlantic cod, an historically dominant piscivore in the region, we found that both historical and future warming led to a decline in the proportion of prey species’ range it occupied and caused a potential reduction in its ability to exert top-down control on these prey. In contrast, the potential for overlap of spiny dogfish with prey species was ... : Observed and modeled presence 1968-2014NMFS Trawl Survey data used to fit species distribution models and the resulting modeled predictions for presence/absence (preds1) and abundance (preds).historical.RDataProjected species probability of occupancy and abundance under ocean warmingPredicted probability of occupancy (preds1) and abundance (preds) under a doubling of carbon dioxide using simulations from GFDL 2.6.projected.RData ...