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A cross-taxa assessment of the impact of climate change on population abundance

Subject Area Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
Term from 2014 to 2018
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 263582437
 
Final Report Year 2019

Final Report Abstract

Understanding which species are being more impacted by climate change is one of the most important questions facing ecologists because it determines which communities and ecosystems will be most at risk in the future. To examine interspecific variation in climate change impacts, we compiled one of the largest population time series datasets in central Europe to date, including data from 22 communities and over 1000 species across the terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms, collected since 1980 onwards. Overall, there was a mixture of population trends; some species have increased, similar numbers have decreased, and many have remained more or less stable. To test for signals of climate change, we related this variation in population trends to species’ temperature preferences, to ask whether warm-adapted species showed more positive trends than cool-adapted species, as would be predicted under climate change. We found signals in many of the terrestrial communities but in only one of the aquatic communities (marine fish), suggesting that, at least since 1980, climate change has been a widespread driver of trends in the terrestrial realm. In particular, we found that many warm-adapted terrestrial species have increased but also some cold-adapted species have decreased. Other drivers (changes in external nutrient loads and fishery exploitation) have probably been a more important driver in freshwater and marine communities. The influence of climate change in terrestrial communities was further supported by analysis of the relationships between species’ abundances and annual temperatures. Terrestrial species responded positively to warmer winters but aquatic species showed both positive and negative effects on interannual temperature fluctuations, depending on the season. Hence, our results suggest that many terrestrial species directly benefit from warmer temperatures, although there are likely to be indirect negative effects that were not captured by our analysis. Across different communities, species with large geographic ranges were generally less affected by temperature fluctuations, as well as those with larger bodies and longer generation times in some communities. In more detailed analyses focusing on bird populations in Denmark, we found that climate change has caused variation in population trends among species, leading to changes in the relative abundances of different species and ultimately community composition. By contrast, land use change (agricultural intensification) has had consistent negative effects over a broad range of species and has been more responsible for the overall decline of the bird community. Declines of insectivorous birds in Denmark, and more broadly across Europe, were mostly linked to species habitat preferences, suggesting an important role of grassland loss, and less strongly linked to temperature preferences. Overall, the findings of our project have shown the variety of ways in which climate change can affect species and the value of cross-realm and trait-based analysis to gain a deeper insight into the relative importance of climate change compared with other drivers.

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