9/3/2023 0 Comments Danner underpass overlookConversely, landscape‐level processes such as these can promote the overall stability or diversity of a system subjected to environmental variation. This movement towards favourable‐temperature areas can simply reduce the occupiable niche space for interacting species, exacerbating the effects of an interaction (Salt et al., 2017). For example, individuals may move towards an area of favourable temperature where growth rates will increase (Barton & Ives, 2014) or seek refuge to escape predation or competition which may have increased due to temperature change (Daugaard et al., 2019 Jiang & Kulczycki, 2004 Walberg & Green, 2021). Individuals track favourable conditions to occupy a suitable thermal niche (Chesson & Warner, 1981 Leibold et al., 2004), and so temperature variation can be expected to alter the spatial dynamics of species at the landscape scale. This oversight is particularly pertinent given that, in natural systems, landscapes are thermally heterogeneous, with temperature being a key driver of species distributions (Hutchins, 1947 Parmesan & Yohe, 2003). However, to date, experimental studies investigating the effects of temperature variation at the community level tend to do so in simple single‐patch systems (Leary & Petchey, 2009 Rasconi et al., 2017), overlooking the important role of spatial dynamics in driving patterns of response. This highlights the importance of tracking the responses of individual species to temperature variation through time in order to understand what drives community‐level responses. Modelling has revealed that these processes can occur in tandem, with environmental variation simultaneously increasing risk of stochastic extinction and permitting coexistence (Adler & Drake, 2008). in phytoplankton, Rasconi et al., 2017), and decreasing species richness by reducing reproduction (e.g. ![]() in amphibians, Rohr & Raffel, 2010), causing community destabilisation by favouring fast‐growing species that dominate a community (e.g. Conversely, temperature variation can have a range of detrimental consequences – causing population declines and ultimately local extinctions by reducing species' ability to withstand diseases (e.g. This was demonstrated in lake zooplankton, where temperature variation increased diversity by facilitating niche partitioning (Shurin et al., 2010). Locally, temporal temperature variation can promote coexistence between competing species if they respond asynchronously to the temperature variation (Yachi & Loreau, 1999). Consequently, when temperature is variable, it can greatly alter the dynamics of communities (at the local scale) and metacommunities (at the landscape scale). The direct effects of temperature in determining the growth rates and metabolic activity of individuals (Brown et al., 2004) scale up to the community level, with such changes impacting the structure of communities through changes not only in species survivorship (Trew & Maclean, 2021) but also in the strength of interactions between species (Meester et al., 2015). ![]() This role of environmental variability as a facilitator of coexistence or a promoter of extinctions illustrates that insights on this topic are needed in the face of current and future global change scenarios where variability of environmental factors such as climate and habitat availability is expected to increase (Bathiany et al., 2018).Īmong the environmental conditions which shape the abundance and distribution of organisms, temperature is understood to be of fundamental importance. On the other hand, it may also facilitate temporal niche partitioning among species that perform best in different conditions, thus avoiding competitive processes and promoting diversity (the storage effect Chesson & Warner, 1981 Snyder & Adler, 2011). ![]() Environmental variation has been shown to lower species fitness and diversity due to differential responses to new conditions and increased risk of stochastic extinctions (Adler & Drake, 2008 Rasconi et al., 2015). To date, the idiosyncrasy of how fluctuating conditions affect the coexistence of species in communities has resulted in mixed findings (Adler & Drake, 2008 Chesson & Huntly, 1997 Connell, 1978). Such topics have been investigated with macro‐ (Fried‐Petersen et al., 2020) and micro‐scale (Leary et al., 2012) approaches, and tackled at the population (Gonzalez & Holt, 2002) and community level (Shurin et al., 2010). The role of variable environmental conditions in shaping species diversity within ecosystems is a prominent theme in ecology and conservation biology (Bernhardt et al., 2020 Trew & Maclean, 2021).
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