Abstract
Species interactions are known to structure ecological communities. Still, the influence of climate change on biodiversity has primarily been evaluated by correlating individual species distributions with local climatic descriptors, then extrapolating into future climate scenarios. We ask whether predictions on arctic arthropod response to climate change can be improved by accounting for species interactions. For this, we use a 14‐year‐long, weekly time series from Greenland, resolved to the species level by mitogenome mapping. During the study period, temperature increased by 2°C and arthropod species richness halved. We show that with abiotic variables alone, we are essentially unable to predict species responses, but with species interactions included, the predictive power of the models improves considerably. Cascading trophic effects thereby emerge as important in structuring biodiversity response to climate change. Given the need to scale up from species‐level to community‐level projections of biodiversity change, these results represent a major step forward for predictive ecology.
Highlights
A central goal of current biodiversity research is to better understand and predict biodiversity response to climate change
Average summer temperature at Zackenberg increased by 2.0°C, and arthropod species richness drastically decreased by 50%
The explanatory powers generally increased with increasing model complexity, since more complex models have more parameters that can be estimated. To account for this potential effect of overfitting, we evaluated the predictive powers of the models through a cross-validation procedure where we masked the data from each year for which a prediction was made
Summary
A central goal of current biodiversity research is to better understand and predict biodiversity response to climate change. Most research on how climate change will affect future ecological communities has focused on the link between the abiotic changes caused by climate warming and subsequent changes in species distributions and abundances (Pereira et al 2010, Pacifici et al 2015). The ongoing changes are modulated by the direct impacts of changing climatic conditions on individual species and indirectly, through. The joint assessment of climate and interspecific interactions is of fundamental importance for improving our current understanding and our predictions of how climate change affects ecological communities (Gilman et al 2010, Van der Putten et al 2010, Blois et al 2013, Scheffers et al 2016)
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