Abstract
Climate change has the capacity to alter physical and biological ecosystem processes, jeopardizing the survival of associated species. This is a particular concern in cool, wet northern peatlands that could experience warmer, drier conditions. Here we show that climate, ecosystem processes and food chains combine to influence the population performance of species in British blanket bogs. Our peatland process model accurately predicts water-table depth, which predicts abundance of craneflies (keystone invertebrates), which in turn predicts observed abundances and population persistence of three ecosystem-specialist bird species that feed on craneflies during the breeding season. Climate change projections suggest that falling water tables could cause 56–81% declines in cranefly abundance and, hence, 15–51% reductions in the abundances of these birds by 2051–2080. We conclude that physical (precipitation, temperature and topography), biophysical (evapotranspiration and desiccation of invertebrates) and ecological (food chains) processes combine to determine the distributions and survival of ecosystem-specialist predators.
Highlights
Climate change has the capacity to alter physical and biological ecosystem processes, jeopardizing the survival of associated species
Climate change is predicted to drive substantial global biodiversity loss, with changing climatic conditions altering physical and biological ecosystem processes, in turn threatening species unable to adapt to the rapidly changing conditions[1,2,3]. This is a major concern for northern peatlands, where warmer, drier conditions under climate change could reduce ecosystem suitability for species associated with cool, wet conditions[4,5]
Latitudinal and elevational retreats of northern and montane species have been attributed to rising temperatures[6,7], but distribution changes may be driven by altered moisture regimes[8,9], which are influenced by temperature, precipitation, soil properties, vegetation and the topography of the land[10]
Summary
Climate change has the capacity to alter physical and biological ecosystem processes, jeopardizing the survival of associated species This is a particular concern in cool, wet northern peatlands that could experience warmer, drier conditions. We model monthly peatland water-table depth (WTD) as a function of climate and topography, and cranefly abundance as a function of WTD, to test whether hydrological processes and invertebrate food resources determine the abundances and distributions of breeding birds in blanket bogs. We show that modelled mean summer WTD is a significant predictor of observed adult cranefly abundance the following year, and use the resulting relationship to produce landscape-scale projections for three focal landscapes (mid Wales, South Pennines and North York Moors; Fig. 1) Within these landscapes, we show that climate change could drive large declines in cranefly abundance by 2051–2080 through changes in WTD. We show that climate, hydrological processes and invertebrate food resources combine to determine the abundances and distributions of ecosystemspecialist predators
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