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Abstract
Climate change ecology has focused on climate effects on trophic interactions through
the lenses of temperature effects on organismal physiology and phenological asynchronies.
Trophic interactions are also affected by the nutrient content of resources, but this
topic has received less attention. Using concepts from nutritional ecology, we propose
a conceptual framework for understanding how climate affects food webs through top-down
and bottom-up processes impacted by co-occurring environmental drivers. The framework
integrates climate effects on consumer physiology and feeding behavior with effects
on resource nutrient content. It illustrates how studying responses of simplified
food webs to simplified climate change might produce erroneous predictions. We encourage
greater integrative complexity of climate change research on trophic interactions
to resolve patterns and enhance predictive capacities.