Biology subjects

Norberg, J.

Publications and source records attributed to Norberg, J..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2020

The importance of species interactions in spatially explicit eco-evolutionary community dynamics under climate change

Eco-evolutionary dynamics are essential in shaping the biological response of communities to ongoing climate change. Here we develop a spatially explicit eco-evolutionary framework which integrates evolution, dispersal, and species interactions within and between trophic levels. This allows us to analyze how these processes interact to shape species- and community-level dynamics under climate change. Additionally, we incorporate the heretofore unexplored feature that species interactions themselves might change due to increasing temperatures and affect the impact of climate change on ecological communities. The new modeling framework captures previously reported ecological responses to climate change, and also reveals two new key results. First, interactions between trophic levels as well as temperature-dependent competition within a trophic level mitigate the negative impact of climate change on global biodiversity, emphasizing the importance of understanding biotic interactions in shaping climate change impact. Second, using a trait-based perspective, we found a strong negative relationship between the within-community variation in preferred temperatures and the capacity to respond to climate change. Communities resulting from different ecological interaction structures form distinct clusters along this relationship, but varying species abilities to disperse and adapt to new temperatures leave it unaffected.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

Amplitude and timescale of metacommunity trait-lag response to climate change

Climate change is altering the structure and functioning of communities 1. Trait-based approaches are powerful predictive tools that allow consideration of changes in structure and functioning simultaneously 2, 3. The realised biomass-weighted trait distribution of a community rests on the ecophysiology of individuals, but integrates local species interactions and spatial dynamics that feed back to ecosystem functioning. Consider a response trait that determines species performance (e.g. growth rate) as a function of an environmental variable (e.g. temperature). The change in this response traits distribution following directional environmental change integrates all factors contributing to the communitys response and directly reflects the communitys response capacity 3. Here we introduce the average regional community trait-lag (TLMC) as a novel measure of whole-metacommunity response to warming. We show that functional compensation (shifts in resident species relative abundances) confers initial response capacity to communities by reducing and delaying the initial development of a trait-lag. Metacommunity adaptive capacity in the long-term, however, was dependent on dispersal and species tracking of their climate niche by incremental traversal of the landscape. With increasing inter-patch distances, network properties of the functional connectivity network became increasingly more important, and may guide prioritisation of habitat for conservation.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

Ecosystem tipping points in an evolving world

There is growing concern over tipping points arising in ecosystems due to the crossing of environmental thresholds. Tipping points lead to strong and possibly irreversible shifts between alternative ecosystem states incurring high societal costs. Traits are central to the feedbacks that maintain alternative ecosystem states, as they govern the responses of populations to environmental change that could stabilize or destabilize ecosystem states. However, we know little about how evolutionary changes in trait distributions over time affect the occurrence of tipping points, and even less about how big scale ecological shifts reciprocally interact with trait dynamics. We argue that interactions between ecological and evolutionary processes should be taken into account for understanding the balance of feedbacks governing tipping points in nature.

ecology↗