Marine cyanobacteria in the anthropocene: Are top-down paradigms robust to climate change?

Abstract

Climate change threatens to alter the processes of ecological interactions in addition to the composition and function of communities. Traditional ecological paradigms typically do not account for strong differences in the impacts of environmental stressors by trophic level, focusing instead on differential effects on competitors or functional types. Massive cyanobacterial blooms now represent a common phenomenon across most freshwater and marine communities. Here, we present a perspective considering marine cyanobacterial mats as an extreme but accessible system in which traditional ecological trophic paradigms may be tested, and make recommendations for future research on this topic.