Accounting for species interactions is necessary for predicting how arctic arthropod communities respond to climate change

• Published in: Ecography
• Main Authors: Abrego, Nerea, Roslin, Tomas, Huotari, Tea, Ji, Yinqiu, Schmidt, Niels Martin, Wang, Jiaxin, Yu, Douglas W., Ovaskainen, Otso
• Other Authors: Department of Agricultural Sciences, Plant Production Sciences, Biosciences, Spatial Foodweb Ecology Group, Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Programme, Otso Ovaskainen / Principal Investigator
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2021
• Subjects: Arctic; Arthropoda; climate change; community assembly; food web; joint species distribution model; trophic cascade; 1172 Environmental sciences; Greenland; Climate change
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10138/332265

Species interactions are known to structure ecological communities. Still, the influence of climate change on biodiversity has primarily been evaluated by correlating individual species distributions with local climatic descriptors, then extrapolating into future climate scenarios. We ask whether predictions on arctic arthropod response to climate change can be improved by accounting for species interactions. For this, we use a 14-year-long, weekly time series from Greenland, resolved to the species level by mitogenome mapping. During the study period, temperature increased by 2 degrees C and arthropod species richness halved. We show that with abiotic variables alone, we are essentially unable to predict species responses, but with species interactions included, the predictive power of the models improves considerably. Cascading trophic effects thereby emerge as important in structuring biodiversity response to climate change. Given the need to scale up from species-level to community-level projections of biodiversity change, these results represent a major step forward for predictive ecology. Peer reviewed