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Temperature and biodiversity influence community stability differently in birds and fishes

Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Determining the factors that affect community stability is crucial to understanding the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in the face of global warming. We investigated how four temperature components (that is, median, variability, trend and extremes) affected diversity–synchrony–stability relationships for 1,246 bird and 580 fish communities from temperate regions. We hypothesized a stabilizing effect on the community if the variation in species’ response to changing median temperature decreases overall community synchrony (hypothesis H1) and if temperature extremes reduce interspecific synchrony at extreme abundances due to variation in species’ thermal tolerance limits (hypothesis H2). We found support for H1 in fish and for H2 in bird communities. Here we showed that the abiotic components (that is, the median, variability, trend and extremes of temperature) had more indirect effects on community stability, predominantly by affecting the biotic components (that is, diversity, synchrony). Considering various temperature components’ direct as well as indirect impacts on stability for terrestrial versus aquatic communities will improve our mechanistic understanding of biodiversity change in response to global climatic stressors.

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Fig. 1: Conceptual figure showing two mechanistic hypotheses (H1 and H2) to understand the effect of changing temperature on community stability via impacts on species collective response (that is, synchrony).
Fig. 2: Model used to explore the impacts of diversity, synchrony and TCs on community stability.
Fig. 3: Results from piecewise structural equation modelling.
Fig. 4: Confirmation of hypothesis H1 for fish communities.
Fig. 5: Confirmation of Hypothesis H2.

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Data availability

All data are openly accessible. Specifically, we used three publicly available databases: (1) community abundance time series data from Project BioDyn29 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8233591), (2) temperature time series data from CHELSA30,31 database (https://chelsa-climate.org/) and (3) species’ global occurrence data from GBIF database (https://www.gbif.org/). The minimum dataset required to interpret, verify and extend the research in the manuscript is also available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12654292 (ref. 67). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Codes written in R-programming language are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12654292 (ref. 67).

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Acknowledgements

S.G. and O.L.P. were supported by funding from the University of Zurich. B.M. was supported by funding from Eawag, SNF (grant number 310030-207910).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Shyamolina Ghosh & Owen L. Petchey

  2. Department of Fish Ecology and Evolution, Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Kastanienbaum, Switzerland

    Blake Matthews

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  1. Shyamolina Ghosh
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Contributions

S.G., B.M. and O.L.P. conceptualized the study. S.G. was responsible for data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software, validation, project management and writing the original draft. O.L.P. acquired funding, provided resources and supervised the project. S.G., B.M. and O.L.P. collaboratively worked on reviewing and editing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Shyamolina Ghosh.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Ian Vaughan and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Tables 1–4, Figs. 1–9 and references.

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Supplementary Data 1

Source data for supplementary figures.

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Source Data Fig. 2

Statistical source data used for Fig. 2, panels b–f; other panels are schematic diagrams; description is provided within the excel file.

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Statistical source data used for Fig. 3; description is provided within the excel file.

Source Data Fig. 4

Statistical source data used for Fig. 4; description is provided within the excel file.

Source Data Fig. 5

Statistical source data used for Fig. 5; description is provided within the excel file.

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Ghosh, S., Matthews, B. & Petchey, O.L. Temperature and biodiversity influence community stability differently in birds and fishes. Nat Ecol Evol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02493-7

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