We have developed a new mechanistic and predictive theory on the effects of habitat change and warming on the dynamics of ecological communities. Firstly, we have developed a theory of temperature-dependent community dynamics. This new theory allows for: (i) getting simple and more accurate predictions of the effects of warming on community structure and stability, (ii) identifying which biological parameters are most sensitive to warming, and (iii) synthesizing previous contradictory experimental results. Secondly, we developed new theory that predicts how habitat fragmentation affects species interaction networks. We developed a new food web model that reveals that stability, increases if habitat loss occurs at random, but stability largely decreases if habitat fragmentation occurs in addition to loss. Thirdly, we developed a new conceptual framework to understand and predict the eco-evolutionary consequences of habitat warming, fragmentation, and their interaction.
Empirically, we have firstly developed a mechanistic approach that links the unconnected fields of thermal ecology, food webs, and eco-evolutionary dynamics. We demonstrated that we can predict the effects of consumers on resources from their combined energetic balances, depending on how they gain and loss energy as temperature changes. We also showed how evolution in response to long-term warming also influences the outcomes of current ecological consumer-resource dynamics at different temperatures.Secondly we have demonstrated that warming can alter the importance of biodiversity for ecosystem functioning. Using phytoplankton communities, we showed that biodiversity loss has a larger impact on ecosystem functioning in warmed ecosystems, and more so in systems where temperature fluctuations are large. Thirdly, we have tested theory on the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation with empirical data. The increase in the number of interactions in which each species is involved when area increases indicates that trophic interactions might be more vulnerable to habitat loss than species richness.
And finally, we showed how warming and habitat fragmentation can interact with each other altering biodiversity. We showed that the effects of warming on biodiversity are scale dependent, and that connectivity seems to have a minor effect on these patterns. However, our mesocosm experiment is challenging this observation, showing that habitat fragmentation has larger effects than warming on phytoplankton biodiversity and stability.
Even if the research conducted in FRAGCLIM is fundamental, we have tried to find applications through collaborations with applied and conservation ecologists and managers. One important example is our research on how water diversion for hydropower affected freshwater food webs, providing recommendations for managers.
Our production and dissemination activities are considerable, presenting our work at scientific conferences, producing several press releases and given interviews for the general public (25 in total), as well as publishing our work in diverse scientific journals (35 in total), including papers in top disciplinary and inter-disciplinary journals as Nature Eco Evo (4), Nature Comms. (2), PNAS, Global Change Biology (3) or Ecology Letters (3).
