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

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Katrin Böhning-Gaese
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 263582437

Predicting the impacts of climate change on species is one of the most important contemporary questions for ecologists. As temperatures have already been increasing for several decades, we can make use of the changes already observed in communities to identify which species are most likely at risk. There are three main recognized fingerprints of climate change: advances in phenology, pole-ward range shifts and community shifts of relative abundance toward warm-adapted species. The first two of these fingerprints have received considerable attention while the third has received much less. Nonetheless, changes in abundance will have direct impacts on local, and probably also global, extinction risk. In this project, we will collaborate with multiple scientists, bringing together long-term population data sets of different species within Central Europe, to assess and compare the impacts of climate change on population abundances. Our project will include data from terrestrial, marine and freshwater systems and species, such as springtails and ground beetles, for which climate change impacts are less understood. We first ask whether climate change signals are detectable by testing the relationship between population trend and species temperature niche and the prediction that warm-adapted species have been more successful than cool-adapted species. The importance of temperature niche for population trends will be compared with the importance of other attributes (such as habitat preference) that might indicate the effect of other environmental drivers (such as land use change). It is increasingly being recognized that species attributes (their ecology, morphology, physiology and life history) will modify responses to climate change. We will test what species attributes modify the strength of the relationship between temperature niche and population trend, which will allow us to infer which types of species are responding faster or slower to climate change. Finally, we will test the utility of the community temperature index (CTI; community averaged temperature niche) for different taxonomic groups. The CTI is a potentially valuable indicator of climate change impacts, especially as a communication tool for the general public and policy makers. However, covariation between temperature niche and other species attributes hinders its application. We aim to develop a corrected CTI that considers this covariation for reassessment of its value. This project contributes to our understanding of how communities are impacted by climate change, for identifying the taxonomic groups and ecosystems most at risk and for directing conservation priorities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Participating Persons: Professorin Dr. Rita Adrian, Ph.D.; Dr. Hans-Günther Bauer; Professor Dr. Reiner Eckmann; Professor Dr. Peter Martin Haase; Professor Dr. Robert Brian O' Hara; Professor Dr. Klaus Henle; Kok van Herk; Professor Dr. Thomas Hickler; Dr. Stefan Klotz; Dr. Alexandra Kraberg, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Ingrid Kröncke, Ph.D.; Dr. David J. Russell; Heiko Schmüser; Dr. Oliver Schweiger; Professor Dr. Stefan Stoll; Professor Dr. Michael Türkay (†); Dr. Karin Voigtländer; Dr. Erik Welk; Professorin Dr. Karen Helen Wiltshire