Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ecologia, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, RJ, CP 68020, Brazil.
Laboratório de Interações Multitróficas e Biodiversidade (LIMBIO), Departamento de Biologia Animal, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade de Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas, SP, CP 6109, Brazil.
Ecol Lett. 2018 Mar;21(3):455-466. doi: 10.1111/ele.12913. Epub 2018 Jan 24.
Ecologists have extensively investigated the effect of warming on consumer-resource interactions, with experiments revealing that warming can strengthen, weaken or have no net effect on top-down control of resources. These experiments have inspired a body of theoretical work to explain the variation in the effect of warming on top-down control. However, there has been no quantitative attempt to reconcile theory with outcomes from empirical studies. To address the gap between theory and experiment, we performed a meta-analysis to examine the combined effect of experimental warming and top-down control on resource biomass and determined potential sources of variation across experiments. We show that differences in experimental outcomes are related to systematic variation in the geographical distribution of studies. Specifically, warming strengthened top-down control when experiments were conducted in colder regions, but had the opposite effect in warmer regions. Furthermore, we found that differences in the thermoregulation strategy of the consumer and openness of experimental arenas to dispersal can contribute to some deviation from the overall geographical pattern. These results reconcile empirical findings and support the expectation of geographical variation in the response of consumer-resource interactions to warming.
生态学家广泛研究了升温对消费者-资源相互作用的影响，实验表明升温可以加强、削弱或对资源的自上而下控制没有净效应。这些实验激发了大量的理论工作来解释升温对自上而下控制的影响的变化。然而，还没有人试图从理论上解释与经验研究结果之间的差异。为了解决理论和实验之间的差距，我们进行了荟萃分析，以检验实验升温和自上而下控制对资源生物量的综合影响，并确定了实验之间变化的潜在来源。我们表明，实验结果的差异与研究地理分布的系统变化有关。具体来说，当实验在较冷的地区进行时，升温会加强自上而下的控制，但在较暖的地区则会产生相反的效果。此外，我们发现消费者的体温调节策略和实验场地对扩散的开放性的差异可能导致与整体地理模式的一些偏差。这些结果调和了经验发现，并支持了消费者-资源相互作用对升温的反应存在地理差异的预期。
