Abstract
Interspecific interactions are deeply affected by the current scenario of climate change. This is because interactions are sensitive to many traits of interacting species as phenology, distribution, behaviour and relative abundances which may be differently influenced by climate change in each species. In this scenario, positive interactions, which require temporal coordination of events of life history of interacting species, could be particularly altered due to differential effects of climate change on phenology, apart from by the effects on abundance and distribution. Hitherto, studies focusing on the effects of climate change on positive biotic interactions are scarce and mainly focused on plant-pollinator interactions. Here I propose that, by inducing informational mismatches, climate change may lead to individuals from competing species relying on heterospecific social information to making mis- or un-informed decisions. The idea is that competing species are valuable sources of social information to each other provided overlap of their activities occurs. However, whenever coordination of events fails, competing species will co-occur at the wrong moment, co-occur only in small numbers or even not co-occur at all and thus they will not be able to access useful or any social information from heterospecifics. In that scenario, interacting species would be mis- or un- informed, and, consequently, decision taking will be impaired, leading to disequilibrium in the community. Throughout the manuscript, I will develop the idea of mismatches of information and illustrate it with some case studies.
Highlights
Biotic interactions are the basis of many essential functions in ecosystems so that their reduction or loss may affect community composition and, biodiversity (Diaz et al, 2013)
Interactions are likely to be very susceptible to climate change, as they are sensitive to the phenology, distribution, behavior, physiology, and relative abundances of multiple species (Suttle et al, 2007; Tylianakis et al, 2007), and the response of each species to climate change may widely differ (Tylianakis et al, 2008)
I propose that interspecific interactions among competitors may be affected by climate change two-fold: (1) through its effects on availability of social information by alteration of the phenology, abundance and distribution of interacting species; and (2) through its effects on competition
Summary
Biotic interactions are the basis of many essential functions in ecosystems so that their reduction or loss may affect community composition and, biodiversity (Diaz et al, 2013). Speciesspecific changes in phenology may cause temporal mismatches because interacting species such as predators and prey, plants and pollinators, or competitors might be active at different times (Visser and Both, 2005). I propose that, by inducing informational mismatches, climate change may affect pairs of competing species that positively interact through social information use.
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