Using individual metabolism and body size to predict climate warming impacts on aquatic food webs

Lead Research Organisation: Imperial College London
Department Name: Life Sciences

Abstract

This is a joint submission. Please see the main grant with PI Guy Woodward of Queen Mary University of London.

Publications

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Adams G (2017) Community management indicators can conflate divergent phenomena: two challenges and a decomposition-based solution in Journal of Applied Ecology

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Adams GL (2013) Diatoms can be an important exception to temperature-size rules at species and community levels of organization. in Global change biology

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Defriez EJ (2016) Climate change-related regime shifts have altered spatial synchrony of plankton dynamics in the North Sea. in Global change biology

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Ewers RM (2013) Using landscape history to predict biodiversity patterns in fragmented landscapes. in Ecology letters

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García-Carreras B (2013) Are changes in the mean or variability of climate signals more important for long-term stochastic growth rate? in PloS one

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Hudson L (2012) Cheddar: analysis and visualisation of ecological communities in R in Methods in Ecology and Evolution

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Hudson LN (2013) A cure for the plague of parameters: constraining models of complex population dynamics with allometries. in Proceedings. Biological sciences

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Hudson LN (2013) The relationship between body mass and field metabolic rate among individual birds and mammals. in The Journal of animal ecology

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O'Gorman E (2012) Global Change in Multispecies Systems Part 2

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Reuman DC (2014) A metabolic perspective on competition and body size reductions with warming. in The Journal of animal ecology

 
Description Some important findings so far include showing for the first time that competition can be an important factor in body-size reductions widely observed in ectotherms under warming. For phytoplankton, cells are expected, based on our work, to have an accentuated competitive advantage for nutrient uptake and rapid growth in warmer waters. The same may be true of other ectotherms. Although this is the case generally, it is not always true, and exceptions in the study system may further clarify mechanisms.
Exploitation Route As we work to continue to clarify mechanisms we will want to understand in what contexts we may expect smaller body sizes of single-cell producers and other ectotherms in aquatic environments. This is important because fisheries are based, ultimately, on this kind of production, eaten by zooplankton and then transported up through the food chain. The research is basic science, and is useful in that it helps us understand the reasons for one of the major biotic responses to climate change.
Sectors Environment
URL http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2656.12064/full
 
Title "cheddar" software package for the R programming language 
Description A package of software tools for manipulating certain kinds of food web data, now on the Comprehensive R Archive Network 
Type Of Material Improvements to research infrastructure 
Year Produced 2013 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact At least five papers in prep or in press so far have used the package for their analysis 
URL http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/cheddar/index.html
 
Title The relationship between body mass and field metabolic rate among individual birds and mammals 
Description The online supplement to this paper contains the complete dataset used, which is the biggest ever dataset assembled on metabolic rates and body sizes of individual birds and mammals. 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2013 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact The data are available to be used in future research. 
URL http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2656.12086/suppinfo
 
Title diatom data 
Description Body sizes of diatoms in icelandic streams across a temperature gradient 
Type Of Material Database/Collection of data 
Year Produced 2013 
Provided To Others? Yes  
Impact The database is available to other researchers 
URL http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.12285/suppinfo
 
Title Cheddar ? analysis and visualization of ecological communities in R 
Description A software package submitted to the Comprehensive R Archive Network and described in a publication. Very useful for the work. 
Type Of Technology Software 
Impact Publication date is an estimate of completion or near completion, since the software has been available open source through a large part of its development.