Schleuning, Matthias and Fründ, Jochen and Schweiger, Oliver and Welk, Erik and Albrecht, Jörg and Albrecht, Matthias and Beil, Marion and Benadi, Gita and Blüthgen, Nico and Bruelheide, Helge and Böhning-Gaese, Katrin and Dehling, D. Matthias and Dormann, Carsten F. and Exeler, Nina and Farwig, Nina and Harpke, Alexander and Hickler, Thomas and Kratochwil, Anselm and Kuhlmann, Michael and Kühn, Ingolf and Michez, Denis and Mudri-Stojnić, Sonja and Plein, Michaela and Rasmont, Pierre and Schwabe, Angelika and Settele, Josef and Vujić, Ante and Weiner, Christiane N. and Wiemers, Martin and Hof, Christian (2016):
Ecological networks are more sensitive to plant than to animal extinction under climate change.
In: Nature communications, 7, p. 13965. ISSN 2041-1723,
[Article]

Abstract

Impacts of climate change on individual species are increasingly well documented, but we lack understanding of how these effects propagate through ecological communities. Here we combine species distribution models with ecological network analyses to test potential impacts of climate change on >700 plant and animal species in pollination and seed-dispersal networks from central Europe. We discover that animal species that interact with a low diversity of plant species have narrow climatic niches and are most vulnerable to climate change. In contrast, biotic specialization of plants is not related to climatic niche breadth and vulnerability. A simulation model incorporating different scenarios of species coextinction and capacities for partner switches shows that projected plant extinctions under climate change are more likely to trigger animal coextinctions than vice versa. This result demonstrates that impacts of climate change on biodiversity can be amplified via extinction cascades from plants to animals in ecological networks.

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