School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, University of Washington, 3707 Brooklyn Avenue NE, Seattle, WA 98105, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2020 Dec 9;287(1940):20202424. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.2424.
Studies of the ecological effects of global change often focus on one or a few species at a time. Consequently, we know relatively little about the changes underway at real-world scales of biological communities, which typically have hundreds or thousands of interacting species. Here, we use COI mtDNA amplicons from monthly samples of environmental DNA to survey 221 planktonic taxa along a gradient of temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and carbonate chemistry in nearshore marine habitat. The result is a high-resolution picture of changes in ecological communities using a technique replicable across a wide variety of ecosystems. We estimate community-level differences associated with time, space and environmental variables, and use these results to forecast near-term community changes due to warming and ocean acidification. We find distinct communities in warmer and more acidified conditions, with overall reduced richness in diatom assemblages and increased richness in dinoflagellates. Individual taxa finding more suitable habitat in near-future waters are more taxonomically varied and include the ubiquitous coccolithophore and the harmful dinoflagellate sp. These results suggest foundational changes for nearshore food webs under near-future conditions.
关于全球变化对生态影响的研究通常一次只关注一个或几个物种。因此，我们对于生物群落的实际规模正在发生的变化相对知之甚少，而这些生物群落通常有数百或数千种相互作用的物种。在这里，我们使用 COI mtDNA 扩增子从环境 DNA 的每月样本中调查了近岸海洋生境中温度、盐度、溶解氧和碳酸盐化学梯度上的 221 个浮游生物分类群。该结果使用可在各种生态系统中复制的技术提供了生态群落变化的高分辨率图片。我们估计了与时间、空间和环境变量相关的群落水平差异，并利用这些结果预测由于变暖和海洋酸化导致的近期群落变化。我们发现温暖和酸化条件下存在不同的群落，硅藻组合的总体丰富度降低，甲藻的丰富度增加。在未来的近岸水域中找到更适宜栖息地的单个分类群在分类上更加多样化，包括无处不在的颗石藻和有害的甲藻。这些结果表明，在未来的近岸条件下，近岸食物网将发生基础性变化。
