Abstract
The Arctic is experiencing some of the fastest rates of warming on the planet. Although many studies have documented responses to such warming by individual species, the idiosyncratic nature of these findings has prevented us from extrapolating them to community-level predictions. Here, we leverage the availability of a long-term dataset from Zackenberg, Greenland (593 700 specimens collected between 1996 and 2014), to investigate how climate parameters influence the abundance of different arthropod groups and overall community composition. We find that variation in mean seasonal temperatures, winter duration and winter freeze–thaw events is correlated with taxon-specific and habitat-dependent changes in arthropod abundances. In addition, we find that arthropod communities have exhibited compositional changes consistent with the expected effects of recent shifts towards warmer active seasons and fewer freeze–thaw events in NE Greenland. Changes in community composition are up to five times more extreme in drier than wet habitats, with herbivores and parasitoids generally increasing in abundance, while the opposite is true for surface detritivores. These results suggest that species interactions and food web dynamics are changing in the Arctic, with potential implications for key ecosystem processes such as decomposition, nutrient cycling and primary productivity.
Highlights
Arthropods have long been recognized as a model group for detecting organismal responses to climate change because of their short lifespans and the strong effects that temperature can have on their life histories
The Zackenberg Basic Monitoring Programme at Zackenberg Research Station has consistently monitored climate variables and surface-active arthropod communities in northeastern Greenland since 1996 [54]. This dataset is uniquely suited for the study of community-wide responses to climate change, because it contains information on all trophic levels within the local arthropod community and because the area has undergone extreme summertime warming over recent years (e.g. [47,55,56])
Based on previous short-term studies of arthropod responses to warming (e.g. [44,58,59]), we expected that detritivores would be the most sensitive to a warming climate and that the greatest changes in overall arthropod community composition would occur in those habitats with lower moisture availability
Summary
Arthropods have long been recognized as a model group for detecting organismal responses to climate change because of their short lifespans and the strong effects that temperature can have on their life histories. The Zackenberg Basic Monitoring Programme at Zackenberg Research Station has consistently monitored climate variables and surface-active arthropod communities in northeastern Greenland since 1996 [54]. This dataset is uniquely suited for the study of community-wide responses to climate change, because it contains information on all trophic levels within the local arthropod community and because the area has undergone extreme summertime warming over recent years [44,58,59]), we expected that detritivores would be the most sensitive to a warming climate and that the greatest changes in overall arthropod community composition would occur in those habitats with lower moisture availability (arid and mesic heath). We consider the annual number of winter freeze–thaw events, which are another source of temperature-related stress for these animals [49,63]
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