Predictability and constraints on the structure of ecological communities in the context of climate change

• Main Author: Barner, Allison K.
• Other Authors: Menge, Bruce A., Hacker, Sally D., Heppell, Selina, Novak, Mark, Gitelman, Alix, Integrative Biology, Oregon State University. Graduate School
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English; unknown
• Published: Oregon State University
• Subjects: Intertidal ecology > Northwest; Pacific; Coralline algae > Climatic factors > Northwest; Saccharina > Climatic factors > Northwest; Bioclimatology > Northwest; Intertidal organisms > Climatic factors > Northwest; Kelp bed ecology > Northwest; Ocean acidification
• Online Access: https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/rf55zd46s

Ecologists must increasingly balance the need for accurate predictions about how ecosystems will be affected by climate change, against the fact that making such predictions at the ecosystem-level may be infeasible. Although information about responses of individual species to a changing environment is increasing, scaling such information to the community level is challenging. To date, predicting responses of ecological communities to climate change is constrained by limited theoretical and empirical knowledge about the response of communities and ecosystems to change. My dissertation addresses several knowledge gaps in our understanding of community structure under climate change. This research draws from a rich experimental tradition in the species-diverse model ecosystem of the US Pacific Northwest rocky intertidal to test ecological theory. In Chapter 2, I assessed whether the response of multiple species of coralline algae to global change could be predicted from basic first principles of chemistry, physiology, and ecology. Given the rate of global change, and the time-consuming process of experimentally determining species responses to climate change, I hypothesized that species can be grouped using existing theory, either by their evolutionary relatedness or by their ecological traits, such that climate responses are similar within a group. Such a scheme would greatly reduce the number of experiments needed to characterize species climate vulnerability, requiring the characterization of the response of groups of species to climate change, rather than individual species. Using a suite of five co-occurring species of intertidal articulated coralline algae (Corallina vancouveriensis, Corallina officinalis, Bossiella plumosa, Bossiella orbiginiana, and Calliarthron tuberculosum), I applied this framework to generate ten mutually exclusive hypotheses that could explain organismal response to ocean acidification, a consequence of global climate change that threatens marine calcifying species. I found that all ...