Centre for Conservation Biology, Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
Science. 2013 Jan 18;339(6117):313-5. doi: 10.1126/science.1226766.
Recently accumulated evidence has documented a climate impact on the demography and dynamics of single species, yet the impact at the community level is poorly understood. Here, we show that in Svalbard in the high Arctic, extreme weather events synchronize population fluctuations across an entire community of resident vertebrate herbivores and cause lagged correlations with the secondary consumer, the arctic fox. This synchronization is mainly driven by heavy rain on snow that encapsulates the vegetation in ice and blocks winter forage availability for herbivores. Thus, indirect and bottom-up climate forcing drives the population dynamics across all overwintering vertebrates. Icing is predicted to become more frequent in the circumpolar Arctic and may therefore strongly affect terrestrial ecosystem characteristics.
最近积累的证据记录了气候对单一物种的种群动态和动态的影响，但对群落水平的影响还知之甚少。在这里，我们表明，在高纬度的斯瓦尔巴群岛，极端天气事件使整个居留性脊椎草食动物群落的种群波动同步，并与二级消费者北极狐产生滞后相关。这种同步主要是由雪上的大雨驱动的，大雨将植被包裹在冰中，阻止了草食动物冬季的觅食。因此，间接的和自上而下的气候强迫驱动着所有越冬脊椎动物的种群动态。预计在环极北极地区，结冰现象将更加频繁，因此可能会强烈影响陆地生态系统的特征。
