Global change and species interactions in terrestrial ecosystems
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 5 November 2008
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Wiley in Ecology Letters
- Vol. 11 (12), 1351-1363
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2008.01250.x
Abstract
The main drivers of global environmental change (CO2 enrichment, nitrogen deposition, climate, biotic invasions and land use) cause extinctions and alter species distributions, and recent evidence shows that they exert pervasive impacts on various antagonistic and mutualistic interactions among species. In this review, we synthesize data from 688 published studies to show that these drivers often alter competitive interactions among plants and animals, exert multitrophic effects on the decomposer food web, increase intensity of pathogen infection, weaken mutualisms involving plants, and enhance herbivory while having variable effects on predation. A recurrent finding is that there is substantial variability among studies in both the magnitude and direction of effects of any given GEC driver on any given type of biotic interaction. Further, we show that higher order effects among multiple drivers acting simultaneously create challenges in predicting future responses to global environmental change, and that extrapolating these complex impacts across entire networks of species interactions yields unanticipated effects on ecosystems. Finally, we conclude that in order to reliably predict the effects of GEC on community and ecosystem processes, the greatest single challenge will be to determine how biotic and abiotic context alters the direction and magnitude of GEC effects on biotic interactions.Keywords
This publication has 107 references indexed in Scilit:
- Proximity to forest edge does not affect crop production despite pollen limitationProceedings. Biological sciences, 2008
- Contrasting effects of invasive plants in plant–pollinator networksOecologia, 2008
- Non-random coextinctions in phylogenetically structured mutualistic networksNature, 2007
- The impact of an alien plant on a native plant–pollinator network: an experimental approachEcology Letters, 2007
- Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate ChangeAnnual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 2006
- Plant–plant interactions and environmental changeNew Phytologist, 2006
- Plant reproductive susceptibility to habitat fragmentation: review and synthesis through a meta‐analysisEcology Letters, 2006
- Virus infection and grazing exert counteracting influences on survivorship of native bunchgrass seedlings competing with invasive exoticsJournal of Ecology, 2006
- Widespread amphibian extinctions from epidemic disease driven by global warmingNature, 2006
- Ecological responses to recent climate changeNature, 2002