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Community responses to seawater warming are conserved across diverse biological groupings and taxonomic resolutions.

ABSTRACT: Temperature variability is a major driver of ecological pattern, with recent changes in average and extreme temperatures having significant impacts on populations, communities and ecosystems. In the marine realm, very few experiments have manipulated temperature in situ, and current understanding of temperature effects on community dynamics is limited. We developed new technology for precise seawater temperature control to examine warming effects on communities of bacteria, microbial eukaryotes (protists) and metazoans. Despite highly contrasting phylogenies, size spectra and diversity levels, the three community types responded similarly to seawater warming treatments of +3°C and +5°C, highlighting the critical and overarching importance of temperature in structuring communities. Temperature effects were detectable at coarse taxonomic resolutions and many taxa responded positively to warming, leading to increased abundances at the community-level. Novel field-based experimental approaches are essential to improve mechanistic understanding of how ocean warming will alter the structure and functioning of diverse marine communities.

SUBMITTER: Smale DA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5597821 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Community responses to seawater warming are conserved across diverse biological groupings and taxonomic resolutions.

Smale Dan A DA Taylor Joe D JD Coombs Steve H SH Moore Gerald G Cunliffe Michael M

Proceedings. Biological sciences 20170901 1862

Temperature variability is a major driver of ecological pattern, with recent changes in average and extreme temperatures having significant impacts on populations, communities and ecosystems. In the marine realm, very few experiments have manipulated temperature <i>in situ</i>, and current understanding of temperature effects on community dynamics is limited. We developed new technology for precise seawater temperature control to examine warming effects on communities of bacteria, microbial euka ...[more]

PMID: 28878056

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Project description:Transformations of natural landscapes and their biodiversity have become increasingly dramatic and intense, creating a demand for rapid and inexpensive methods to assess and monitor ecosystems, especially the most vulnerable ones, such as aquatic systems. The speed with which surveys can collect, identify, and describe ecological patterns is much slower than that of the loss of biodiversity. Thus, there is a tendency for higher-level taxonomic identification to be used, a practice that is justified by factors such as the cost-benefit ratio, and the lack of taxonomists and reliable information on species distributions and diversity. However, most of these studies do not evaluate the degree of representativeness obtained by different taxonomic resolutions. Given this demand, the present study aims to investigate the congruence between species-level and genus-level data for the infraorder Nepomorpha, based on taxonomic and numerical resolutions. We collected specimens of aquatic Nepomorpha from five streams of first to fourth order of magnitude in the Pindaíba River Basin in the Cerrado of the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, totaling 20 sites. A principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) applied to the data indicated that species-level and genus-level abundances were relatively similar (>80% similarity), although this similarity was reduced when compared with the presence/absence of genera (R?=?0.77). The presence/absence ordinations of species and genera were similar to those recorded for their abundances (R?=?0.95 and R?=?0.74, respectively). The results indicate that analyses at the genus level may be used instead of species, given a loss of information of 11 to 19%, although congruence is higher when using abundance data instead of presence/absence. This analysis confirms that the use of the genus level data is a safe shortcut for environmental monitoring studies, although this approach must be treated with caution when the objectives include conservation actions, and faunal complementarity and/or inventories.

Dataset Information

Community responses to seawater warming are conserved across diverse biological groupings and taxonomic resolutions.

Publications

Community responses to seawater warming are conserved across diverse biological groupings and taxonomic resolutions.

Similar Datasets

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