Chapter 6 - Biodiversity, Ecosystem Functioning, and Services in Fresh Waters: Ecological and Evolutionary Implications of Climate Change

Abstract

Freshwater ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to the different components of climate change, yet we still have a limited understanding of the consequences of these environmental drivers and their interactions with other stressors, especially at the higher, multispecies, organizational levels. We review the current state of the field and identify several key areas where rapid progress has already been made, as well as those that still remain largely uncharted: although the jigsaw puzzle of our understanding of ecological and evolutionary responses to climate change is taking shape at an accelerating rate, huge gaps still need to be filled before we can start to see the bigger picture. In the future a more integrated “multiplex” approach is needed to forge the currently missing links between organizational levels, across scales in time and space, and among ecological and evolutionary phenomena—some of this can be achieved by redirecting existing research in a more coordinated fashion, but other areas will require entirely new approaches to both how research is funded and how it is done.