Potential impacts of climate change on insect communities: a transplant experiment.

Sabine S Nooten,Nigel R Andrew,Lesley Hughes,Michael Sears

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0085987

Sabine S Nooten, Nigel R Andrew + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0085987

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Abstract

Climate change will have profound impacts on the distribution, abundance and ecology of all species. We used a multi-species transplant experiment to investigate the potential effects of a warmer climate on insect community composition and structure. Eight native Australian plant species were transplanted into sites approximately 2.5°C (mean annual temperature) warmer than their native range. Subsequent insect colonisation was monitored for 12 months. We compared the insect communities on transplanted host plants at the warmer sites with control plants transplanted within the species' native range. Comparisons of the insect communities were also made among transplanted plants at warmer sites and congeneric plant species native to the warmer transplant area. We found that the morphospecies composition of the colonising Coleoptera and Hemiptera communities differed markedly between transplants at the control compared to the warmer sites. Community structure, as described by the distribution of feeding guilds, was also found to be different between the controls and transplants when the entire Coleoptera and Hemiptera community, including non-herbivore feeding guilds, was considered. However, the structure of the herbivorous insect community showed a higher level of consistency between plants at control and warm sites. There were marked differences in community composition and feeding guild structure, for both herbivores and non-herbivores, between transplants and congenerics at the warm sites. These results suggest that as the climate warms, considerable turnover in the composition of insect communities may occur, but insect herbivore communities may retain elements of their present-day structure.

Highlights

The distribution, abundance, physiology, behaviour and ecology of all species will be affected by climate change [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Host plant species Eight host plant species from three major Australian plant families were chosen, based on three criteria: all species were native to Australia, had a relatively narrow distribution within or close to the Sydney Basin, and all were locally common in dry sclerophyll forest habitats
Growth was significantly different among sites for three of the eight plant species: A. obtusata grew more at warm 2 (W2), C. pinifolius grew less at warm 1 (W1) and T. speciosissima grew more at the control site (Table S2 in file S1)

Summary

Introduction

The distribution, abundance, physiology, behaviour and ecology of all species will be affected by climate change [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Species are expected to respond idiosyncratically, resulting in changes in interactions, such as competition, predation or parasitism, with far-reaching consequences for community structure, composition and function [8,9,10]. Insects have already responded to climatic changes over the past few decades, via range shifts and changes in phenology [11,12,13,14,15,16]. Mismatches in interactions between species have occurred, due to temporal [17,18] and spatial [13,14,15] decoupling. Significant changes in the structure of species assemblages are already apparent in both temperate and tropical regions (e.g. [19,20,21])

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