Sammendrag
Generality in understanding biodiversity responses to climate change
has been hampered by substantial variation in the rates and even
directions of response to a given change in climate. We propose
that such context dependencies can be clarified by rescaling
climate gradients in terms of the underlying biological processes,
with biotic interactions as a particularly important process. We
tested this rescaling approach in a replicated field experiment
where entire montane grassland communities were transplanted
in the direction of expected temperature and/or precipitation
change. In line with earlier work, we found considerable variation
across sites in community dynamics in response to climate change.
However, these complex context dependencies could be substantially reduced or eliminated by rescaling climate drivers in terms of
proxies of plant−plant interactions. Specifically, bryophytes limited
colonization by new species into local communities, whereas the
cover of those colonists, along with bryophytes, were the primary
drivers of local extinctions. These specific interactions are relatively
understudied, suggesting important directions for future work in
similar systems. More generally, the success of our approach in
explaining and simplifying landscape-level variation in climate
change responses suggests that developing and testing proxies
for relevant underlying processes could be a fruitful direction for building more general models of biodiversity response to climate change.
colonization | extinction | context dependency | temperature |precipitation
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