Abstract
Increasing human impact on the environment is causing drastic changes in disturbance regimes and how they prevail over time. Of increasing relevance is to further our understanding on biological responses to pulse disturbances (short duration) and how they interact with other ongoing press disturbances (constantly present). Because the temporal and spatial contexts of single experiments often limit our ability to generalize results across space and time, we conducted a modularized mesocosm experiment replicated in space (five lakes along a latitudinal gradient in Scandinavia) and time (two seasons, spring and summer) to generate general predictions on how the functioning and composition of multitrophic plankton communities (zoo-, phyto- and bacterioplankton) respond to pulse disturbances acting either in isolation or combined with press disturbances. As pulse disturbance, we used short-term changes in fish presence, and as press disturbance, we addressed the ongoing reduction in light availability caused by increased cloudiness and lake browning in many boreal and subarctic lakes. First, our results show that the top-down pulse disturbance had the strongest effects on both functioning and composition of the three trophic levels across sites and seasons, with signs for interactive impacts with the bottom-up press disturbance on phytoplankton communities. Second, community composition responses to disturbances were highly divergent between lakes and seasons: temporal accumulated community turnover of the same trophic level either increased (destabilization) or decreased (stabilization) in response to the disturbances compared to control conditions. Third, we found functional recovery from the pulse disturbances to be frequent at the end of most experiments. In a broader context, these results demonstrate that top-down, pulse disturbances, either alone or with additional constant stress upon primary producers caused by bottom-up disturbances, can induce profound but often functionally reversible changes across multiple trophic levels, which are strongly linked to spatial and temporal context dependencies. Furthermore, the identified dichotomy of disturbance effects on the turnover in community composition demonstrates the potential of disturbances to either stabilize or destabilize biodiversity patterns over time across a wide range of environmental conditions.
Highlights
Generating predictions of ecosystem responses to global environmental change is at the heart of the global political and scientific agenda (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2013; The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019)
With our modularized experiment replicated in space and time, we aim to generate general predictions on how multitrophic communities respond to pulse disturbances with and without additional stress induced by ongoing press disturbances
Of critical importance is to improve our understanding of how plankton communities may react and recover from such pulses with and without ongoing press disturbances in the form of reduced light availability
Summary
Generating predictions of ecosystem responses to global environmental change is at the heart of the global political and scientific agenda (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2013; The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services 2019). It has been acknowledged that disturbances rarely occur in isolation and multiple stressor responses need to be analyzed (Folt et al 1999, Ormerod et al 2010, Urrutia-Cordero et al 2017), the more so as the response to an initial disturbance will affect the susceptibility of communities to sequential environmental changes (Vinebrooke et al 2004, Flo€der and Hillebrand 2012) In light of this general understanding, it is surprising how little we know about the interactions between pulse and press disturbances of different nature, and how they affect ecological responses of entire biological communities across multiple trophic levels (Shade et al 2012, Donohue et al 2016). With our modularized experiment replicated in space and time, we aim to generate general predictions on how multitrophic communities respond to pulse disturbances with and without additional stress induced by ongoing press disturbances
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Topics from this Paper
Pulse Disturbances
Press Disturbance
Turnover In Community Composition
Reduction In Light Availability
Changes In Disturbance Regimes
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