Trends in Geographic Sensitivity of Marine Fishes Over Decades in the North Sea

Chih-Wei Tu,Hsiao Chien Chen,Chia-Ying Ko,Pei-Fen Lee,Yin-Zheng Lai,Chi-Yun Kuo

doi:10.3389/fmars.2021.748278

Chih-Wei Tu, Hsiao Chien Chen + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2021.748278

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Abstract

Accounting for biotic interactions is important for predicting species and ecosystem variation under changing climate but difficult to achieve in practice. The proportion of geographical overlap between species, called species geographical sensitivity (SGS), could be used to gauge the potential for species interactions. Species with increasingly high SGS could have the potential to experience more interactions with other species and vice versa, which might have important implications in ecological assessment, particularly at a community level, in the face of climate change. We compiled fish occurrences in the North Sea from 1983 to 2020 and calculated annual mean SGS (mSGS) to systematically evaluate their temporal changes and to estimate influences of species traits on the relative temporal changes in mSGS. The results showed that 36.3% of species significantly changed their mSGS over time, with high correlations between changes in species range size and overlap with other species. The species’ averaged mSGS before warming was highly correlated with the relative change in mSGS. Depth range, body length, and age at maturity together explained most variation in mSGS among these species. Contemporary climate change is expected to reorganize species distributions and interactions and substantially alter marine ecosystem functioning. Our assessment opens a new avenue for evaluating climate change impacts on species geographical interactions, and such geographical changes may be contingent on species traits.

Highlights

With understandings of climate change impacts on shifts in species distributions and community composition and structure, consideration of biotic interactions in ecological and conservation assessment processes, at the macroecological scale, is necessary (Araújo and Luoto, 2007; Araújo et al, 2011)
The results indicated that species with large mean SGS (mSGS) before warming decreased more in mSGS over decades and shifted their geographical interactions from dependence to independence under warming (Figure 3B)
With long-term, spatially explicit survey data, we documented that species were gradually changing their geographical interactions with other species over approximately 40 years, mostly by expanding their range and degree of overlap with other species, many species still displayed varying geographical independence

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With understandings of climate change impacts on shifts in species distributions and community composition and structure, consideration of biotic interactions in ecological and conservation assessment processes, at the macroecological scale, is necessary (Araújo and Luoto, 2007; Araújo et al, 2011). The changes in nature are more complicated than those in these examples, the finding that individual species’ geographical sensitivity responds to synergistic effects between species range size and overlap with other species may provide a new way to understand how different species may adapt to contemporary climate change. We assessed temporal changes in SGS as a proxy for geographical interactions among species and with regard to the influence of the magnitude of relationships between species range size and overlap with other species over decades. The species traits were associated with SGS dynamics to explore their contributions to patterns and processes in the geographical ranges of fish species and potential involvement in the ability of fish species to adapt to future climatic variation. This study provides a biogeographically informative assessment of marine fish species under warming during the past four decades

MATERIALS AND METHODS

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

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DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT