Dr. Celia Symons Professor, University of California - Irving Species interactions in a changing world As the global climate becomes increasingly extreme and variable, society relies on stable ecosystem functioning for irreplaceable resources and services. To understand what nature will look like in a warmer and more variable future, we must be able to forecast how the climate shapes the strength of negative (predation, competition) and positive (facilitation) species interactions. We have good predictions of how climate will change through time, but we have less understanding of how climate change will cause perturbations across ecological networks via changes in species interactions. Species interactions are more fragile than species themselves because they don’t just require the species to be there, they depend on how species behave, their nutritional requirements, and their phenologies. My research group runs a long-term study of lakes in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains to address the sensitivity of species interactions to spatial and temporal climate variation. Since 2013, we have conducted annual surveys of ecosystem structure, including biomass and community composition of pelagic producers and primary consumers, benthic invertebrates and chemistry in 21 lakes varying in elevation between 2000 and 3200m. Our 11-year survey includes both the wettest and second driest years of the past century, an indication that extreme conditions are occurring more frequently. Our study indicates that climate can magnify or dampen the influence of both bottom-up and top-down perturbations from pollution and non-native species introductions on aquatic ecosystem structure and function.
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