Abstract
ABSTRACTMuch is known about how climate change impacts ecosystem richness and turnover, but we have less understanding of its influence on ecosystem structures. Here, we use ecological metrics (beta diversity, compositional disorder and network skewness) to quantify the community structural responses of temperature‐sensitive chironomids (Diptera: Chironomidae) during the Late Glacial (14 700–11 700 cal a bp) and Holocene (11 700 cal a bp to present). Analyses demonstrate high turnover (beta diversity) of chironomid composition across both epochs; however, structural metrics stayed relatively intact. Compositional disorder and skewness show greatest structural change in the Younger Dryas, following the rapid, high‐magnitude climate change at the Bølling–Allerød to Younger Dryas transition. There were fewer climate‐related structural changes across the early to mid–late Holocene, where climate change was more gradual and lower in magnitude. The reduced impact on structural metrics could be due to greater functional resilience provided by the wider chironomid community, or to the replacement of same functional‐type taxa in the network structure. These results provide insight into how future rapid climate change may alter chironomid communities and could suggest that while turnover may remain high under a rapidly warming climate, community structural dynamics retain some resilience.
Highlights
Current climate change is occurring at an unprecedented rate that will continue over the coming decades (Smith et al, 2015)
We focus on two periods: the relatively rapid, high‐magnitude climate change during the Last Glacial–Interglacial Transition (LGIT), and the more gradual, relatively low‐magnitude climate change experienced during the Holocene
Decreases in rarefaction were detected in association with the Younger Dryas in Late Glacial chironomid records across Europe (Engels et al, 2020), further indicating that the abrupt, high‐magnitude climate change experienced at the Bølling–Allerød to Younger Dryas transition was influential on chironomid communities
Summary
Current climate change is occurring at an unprecedented rate that will continue over the coming decades (Smith et al, 2015). The rate and magnitude of climate change affects the capacity of ecosystems to absorb climate shocks (Overpeck et al, 1991; Skelly et al, 2007; Grimm et al, 2013). The nature of community‐level response to climate‐induced stress will depend on the structural organisation and connectivity of taxa within the ecosystem (Dunne et al, 2002; van Nes and Scheffer, 2005; Scheffer et al, 2012). We aim to improve our understanding of how community structures respond to different rates and magnitudes of climate change by compositional and network analyses of micro‐faunal datasets in lake sediments spanning major climate cycles
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