Edwards Martin, Richardson Anthony J
Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science, The Laboratory, Citadel Hill, Plymouth PL1 2PB, UK.
Nature. 2004 Aug 19;430(7002):881-4. doi: 10.1038/nature02808.
Phenology, the study of annually recurring life cycle events such as the timing of migrations and flowering, can provide particularly sensitive indicators of climate change. Changes in phenology may be important to ecosystem function because the level of response to climate change may vary across functional groups and multiple trophic levels. The decoupling of phenological relationships will have important ramifications for trophic interactions, altering food-web structures and leading to eventual ecosystem-level changes. Temperate marine environments may be particularly vulnerable to these changes because the recruitment success of higher trophic levels is highly dependent on synchronization with pulsed planktonic production. Using long-term data of 66 plankton taxa during the period from 1958 to 2002, we investigated whether climate warming signals are emergent across all trophic levels and functional groups within an ecological community. Here we show that not only is the marine pelagic community responding to climate changes, but also that the level of response differs throughout the community and the seasonal cycle, leading to a mismatch between trophic levels and functional groups.
物候学是对诸如迁徙和开花时间等年度周期性生命周期事件的研究，它能提供特别灵敏的气候变化指标。物候变化对生态系统功能可能很重要，因为不同功能组和多个营养级对气候变化的响应程度可能不同。物候关系的脱钩将对营养相互作用产生重要影响，改变食物网结构并最终导致生态系统层面的变化。温带海洋环境可能尤其容易受到这些变化的影响，因为较高营养级的补充成功高度依赖于与脉冲式浮游生物生产的同步。利用1958年至2002年期间66个浮游生物分类群的长期数据，我们研究了气候变暖信号是否在一个生态群落的所有营养级和功能组中显现出来。我们在此表明，不仅海洋浮游生物群落正在对气候变化做出反应，而且整个群落和季节周期内的反应程度各不相同，导致营养级和功能组之间出现不匹配。
