Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F), Senckenberganlage 25, 60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G2W1.
Nat Commun. 2016 Dec 23;7:13965. doi: 10.1038/ncomms13965.
Impacts of climate change on individual species are increasingly well documented, but we lack understanding of how these effects propagate through ecological communities. Here we combine species distribution models with ecological network analyses to test potential impacts of climate change on >700 plant and animal species in pollination and seed-dispersal networks from central Europe. We discover that animal species that interact with a low diversity of plant species have narrow climatic niches and are most vulnerable to climate change. In contrast, biotic specialization of plants is not related to climatic niche breadth and vulnerability. A simulation model incorporating different scenarios of species coextinction and capacities for partner switches shows that projected plant extinctions under climate change are more likely to trigger animal coextinctions than vice versa. This result demonstrates that impacts of climate change on biodiversity can be amplified via extinction cascades from plants to animals in ecological networks.
气候变化对单一物种的影响已得到充分记录，但我们对于这些影响如何在生态群落中传播还缺乏了解。在这里，我们将物种分布模型与生态网络分析相结合，来检验气候变化对来自欧洲中部的授粉和种子扩散网络中 >700 种动植物物种的潜在影响。我们发现，与较少植物物种相互作用的动物物种，其气候生态位较窄，且最易受到气候变化的影响。相比之下，植物的生物特化与气候生态位宽度和脆弱性无关。一个纳入不同物种共存灭绝情景和伙伴转换能力的模拟模型表明，与反之相比，预计气候变化下的植物灭绝更有可能引发动物灭绝。这一结果表明，气候变化对生物多样性的影响可以通过生态网络中从植物到动物的灭绝级联而放大。
