Linking species traits and demography to explain complex temperature responses across levels of organization

Microbial communities regulate ecosystem responses to climate change. However, predicting these responses is challenging because of complex interactions among processes at multiple levels of organization. Organismal traits that determine individual performance and ecological interactions are essenti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2021-10, Vol.118 (42), p.1-10
Main Authors: Wieczynski, Daniel J., Singla, Pranav, Doan, Adrian, Singleton, Alexandra, Han, Ze-Yi, Votzke, Samantha, Yammine, Andrea, Gibert, Jean P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological Sciences
Cell size
Climate Change
Climate prediction
Community composition
Community ecology
Demography
Ecosystem
Ecosystem functioning
Ecosystems
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Herbivores
Mathematical analysis
Mathematical models
Microbial activity
Microbial diversity
Microbiota
Microorganisms
Population growth
Scaling up
Species
Species Specificity
Temperature
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Summary:Microbial communities regulate ecosystem responses to climate change. However, predicting these responses is challenging because of complex interactions among processes at multiple levels of organization. Organismal traits that determine individual performance and ecological interactions are essential for scaling up environmental responses from individuals to ecosystems. We combine protist microcosm experiments and mathematical models to show that key traits—cell size, shape, and contents—each explain different aspects of species’ demographic responses to changes in temperature. These differences in species’ temperature responses have complex cascading effects across levels of organization—causing nonlinear shifts in total community respiration rates across temperatures via coordinated changes in community composition, equilibrium densities, and community–mean species mass in experimental protist communities that tightly match theoretical predictions. Our results suggest that traits explain variation in population growth, and together, these two factors scale up to influence community- and ecosystem-level processes across temperatures. Connecting the multilevel microbial processes that ultimately influence climate in this way will help refine predictions about complex ecosystem–climate feedbacks and the pace of climate change itself.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2104863118