Thermal diversity affects community responses to warming

Bingzhang Chen

Ecological Modelling, 2022, vol. 464, issue C

Abstract: Scientists often use an exponential equation to model the responses of community metabolic rates to temperature, which however contradicts with the fact that the temperature performance curves of individual species are unimodal, and ignores the difference between intraspecific and interspecific temperature sensitivity. To address these issues, species thermal diversity needs to be considered. To explore how thermal diversity affects community temperature responses, I construct a nutrient-phytoplankton–zooplankton (NPZ) model in which phytoplankton is represented by multiple species with different temperature performance curves. Each curve is determined by a master thermal trait, optimal temperature. I then create two levels of phytoplankton thermal diversity by varying the zooplankton prey density-dependent feeding preference (if zooplankton prefers to feed on abundant prey, prey diversity is enhanced). I find that the responses of the community productivity to temperature is dampened at high diversity compared to low diversity, due to the lower interspecific temperature sensitivity than the intraspecific one. High thermal diversity also confers the community a better capacity to track the environmental temperature fluctuation and withstand high temperature inhibition. In addition, thermal diversity increases community mean optimal temperature. I propose that the community temperature sensitivity is not static and urge that distributions of thermal traits of natural assemblages ought to be measured.

Keywords: Activation energy; Phytoplankton; Optimal temperature; Trait variance; Thermal diversity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304380021003847
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecomod:v:464:y:2022:i:c:s0304380021003847

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2021.109846

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Modelling is currently edited by Brian D. Fath

More articles in Ecological Modelling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().