Angeler, David
- Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
Environmental change can cause regime shifts in ecosystems, potentially threatening ecosystem services. It is unclear if the degradation status of ecosystems correlates with their vulnerability to environmental change, and thus the risk of future regime shifts. We assessed resilience in acidified (degraded) and circumneutral (undegraded) lakes with long-term data (1988-2012), using time series modeling. We identified temporal frequencies in invertebrate assemblages, which identifies groups of species whose population dynamics vary at particular temporal scales. We also assessed species with stochastic dynamics, those whose population dynamics vary irregularly and unpredictably over time. We determined the distribution of functional feeding groups of invertebrates within and across the temporal scales identified, and in those species with stochastic dynamics, and assessed attributes hypothesized to contribute to resilience. Three patterns of temporal dynamics, consistent across study lakes, were identified in the invertebrates. The first pattern was one of monotonic change associated with changing abiotic lake conditions. The second and third patterns appeared unrelated to the environmental changes we monitored. Acidified and the circumneutral lakes shared similar levels and patterns of functional richness, evenness, diversity, and redundancy for species within and across the observed temporal scales and for stochastic species groups. These similar resilience characteristics suggest that both lake types did not differ in vulnerability to the environmental changes observed here. Although both lake types appeared equally vulnerable in this study, our approach demonstrates how assessing systemic vulnerability by quantifying ecological resilience can help address uncertainty in predicting ecosystem responses to environmental change across ecosystems.
Keywords
Environmental change; Benthic invertebrates; Functional redundancy; Scales; Vulnerability; Time series modeling; Resilience; Functional traits
Published in
Oecologia
2015, volume: 178, number: 3, pages: 899-913
Publisher: SPRINGER
SLU Authors
Baho, Didier Ludovic
- Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Johnson, Richard
- Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
- Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Global goals (SDG)
SDG6 Clean water and sanitation
SDG15 Life on land
UKÄ Subject classification
Ecology
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-015-3281-y
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/68557