Interacting environmental and chemical stresses under global change in temperate aquatic ecosystems: stress responses, adaptation, and scaling

Abstract

Unfavorable environmental conditions—abiotic stress—constitute one of the key drivers of evolution leading to environmental adaptation. Since the start of industrial revolution, natural populations are also facing a new stress—global warming—that, in turn, leads to alteration of the severity of most of the existing stress factors and emergence of novel stress combinations. Biological adaptation to environmental perturbations occurs at all levels of biological organization, but the current knowledge on the role of adaptation in responses of ecosystems to global change is limited, especially concerning the interplay of climatic and chemical/pollutant stressors. Particularly limited is the understanding of how biological adaptation alters the performance of aquatic ecosystems that integrate the pollution and nutrient loads from large catchment areas. This review describes the responses, tolerance, acclimation, and adaptation of species at different levels of aquatic food chain to globally changing environmental drivers with emphasis on arctic to temperate ecosystems. The analysis highlights major variations in tolerance and in extent and speed of acclimation and adaptation to various environmental drivers within and among species and among species groups at different trophic levels. The variety of responses to novel stressors causes modifications in species composition and diversity and can lead to asynchronous peak activities of organisms at different trophic levels. All these effects are expected to profoundly alter the aquatic ecosystem productivity, resilience, and adaptation capacity and can ultimately modify the global feedbacks between ecosystem-level processes and environmental drivers. We argue that joint efforts of researchers working at different levels of biological organization are needed to understand and predict global change effects on various functional types of organisms and scale up from physiological responses to large-scale integrated ecosystem responses in future climates.