Persistence and stability of interacting species in response to climate warming: the role of trophic structure
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Persistence and stability of interacting species in response to climate warming: the role of trophic structure Taranjot Kaur1 · Partha Sharathi Dutta1 Received: 30 August 2019 / Accepted: 12 March 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Over the past century, the Earth has experienced roughly 0.4–0.8 ◦ C rise in the average temperature and which is projected to increase between 1.4 and 5.8 ◦ C by the year 2100. The increase in the Earth’s temperature directly influences physiological traits of individual species in ecosystems. However, the effect of these changes in community dynamics, so far, remains relatively unknown. Here, we show that the consequences of warming (i.e., increase in the global mean temperature) on the interacting species persistence or extinction are correlated with their trophic complexity and community structure. In particular, we investigate different nonlinear bioenergetic tri-trophic food web modules, commonly observed in nature, in the order of increasing trophic complexity: a food chain, a diamond food web, and an omnivorous interaction. We find that at low temperatures, warming can destabilize the species dynamics in the food chain as well as the diamond food web, but it has no such effect on the trophic structure that involves omnivory. In the diamond food web, our results indicate that warming does not support top-down control induced co-existence of intermediate species. However, in all the trophic structures, warming can destabilize species up to a threshold temperature. Beyond the threshold temperature, warming stabilizes species dynamics at the cost of the extinction of higher trophic species. We demonstrate the robustness of our results when a few system parameters are varied together with the temperature. Overall, our study suggests that variations in the trophic complexity of simple food web modules can influence the effects of climate warming on species dynamics. Keywords Global warming · Food web modules · Omnivory · Competition · Species co-existence · Biodiversity loss
Introduction Increasing heat waves, severe thunderstorms, rising sea levels, coral bleaching, and loss of ecosystems are a few indicators of current unprecedented global warming (IPCC 2018). Temperature is a major abiotic factor that causes variation in species interactions and abundances (Parmesan and Yohe 2003; Deutsch et al. 2008). It is well established that climate warming can lower species abundance, which in turn may affect their persistence (Parmesan and Yohe 2003). In fact, the increasing temperature creates negative impacts on populations, pushing our ecosystems closer to the face Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00456-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Partha Sharathi Dutta
[email protected] 1
Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, Rupnagar, Punjab, 140 001, India
of mass extinction and a considerable loss of biodiversity (Drake
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