Abstract
Extreme climatic events can have profound effects on ecosystems. Climate change is causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events, which raises the probability that natural ecosystems will be exposed to subsequent or simultaneous extreme events. Exposure to multiple extreme events may involve very different abiotic stressors, which makes it hard to compare their consequences for more than a single or a few species, limiting our knowledge of community level effects. Here, we propose a novel approach to assess how different abiotic stressors influenced soil arthropod communities in a coastal ecosystem, using a species abundance time series of more than two years. We first correlated shifts in community composition with the climatic conditions preceding the sampling dates. Temperature was found to be the most important factor influencing community composition in both locations. Based on local meteorological data, we then defined five types of extreme events which occurred during our monitoring period: heat, cold, drought, heavy precipitation and high sea water levels. To compare the effect of different types of extreme climatic events on community composition, we calculated the multidimensional Hellinger distance between two subsequent sampling dates, which is a measure for the compositional dissimilarity between communities. Extreme events were expected to result in a larger change in community composition between sampling dates and thus a larger Hellinger distance. However, no significant difference in Hellinger distance was found for intervals with or without extreme events in three out of the four location-vegetation combinations. In the saline location with an open vegetation type we found that Hellinger’s distance was reduced when extreme events had occurred, which is discussed in the light of the buffering potential of different vegetation types. Our study illustrates the novel use of an established method from the community ecological toolbox to facilitate direct comparison of different types of extreme climatic events on community composition. We highly encourage other ecologists with long-term monitoring datasets to perform similar analyses and test the general applicability of this method.
Highlights
With ongoing climate change, the intensity and frequency of various extreme climatic events will increase (Rahmstorf and Coumou, 2011; Hansen et al, 2012)
Global heat maxima have steadily risen over the last decades, while at the same time, events of heavy rainfall and prolonged periods of drought have been increasing in prevalence, and this trend is predicted to continue for the years to come (Easterling, 2000)
Of the 77,460 individual animals sampled over the course of our monitoring period, 69,460 met the criteria and thresholds for inclusion in the final analyses, which can be found in Supporting Online Information 2
Summary
The intensity and frequency of various extreme climatic events will increase (Rahmstorf and Coumou, 2011; Hansen et al, 2012). Extreme events will have a severe impact on ecological communities with negative consequences for species, including altered growth rate and increased mortality (Grant et al, 2017; Ummenhofer and Meehl, 2017). Large interspecific differences in tolerance to climatic extremes will affect species composition of the entire community, either directly or indirectly via altered competition, predator-prey interactions, trophic cascades, and both bottom-up and topdown effects (Jentsch and Beierkuhnlein, 2008; Traill et al, 2010; van der Putten et al, 2010; Jiguet et al, 2011; Sentis et al, 2013; Cheng and Grosholz, 2016)
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