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      Biotic rescaling reveals importance of species interactions for variation in biodiversity responses to climate change

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          Significance

          Evidence of climate change impacts on biodiversity is accumulating, but a growing literature also reveals highly variable rates and even directions of these responses. We propose that this complexity arises because biological processes do not respond to climate in direct and linear ways and, therefore, that complex biodiversity responses could be simplified by rescaling climate in terms of the underlying biological processes. Applying this “plant’s eye view” approach to a montane grassland climate change experiment, we find that variation in local extinction and colonization rates in response to temperature and precipitation change across landscapes emerge from unexpected and understudied biotic interactions. Thus, biotic rescaling can simultaneously test mechanistic hypotheses and enhance generality in understanding of biodiversity responses to climate change.

          Abstract

          Generality in understanding biodiversity responses to climate change has been hampered by substantial variation in the rates and even directions of response to a given change in climate. We propose that such context dependencies can be clarified by rescaling climate gradients in terms of the underlying biological processes, with biotic interactions as a particularly important process. We tested this rescaling approach in a replicated field experiment where entire montane grassland communities were transplanted in the direction of expected temperature and/or precipitation change. In line with earlier work, we found considerable variation across sites in community dynamics in response to climate change. However, these complex context dependencies could be substantially reduced or eliminated by rescaling climate drivers in terms of proxies of plant−plant interactions. Specifically, bryophytes limited colonization by new species into local communities, whereas the cover of those colonists, along with bryophytes, were the primary drivers of local extinctions. These specific interactions are relatively understudied, suggesting important directions for future work in similar systems. More generally, the success of our approach in explaining and simplifying landscape-level variation in climate change responses suggests that developing and testing proxies for relevant underlying processes could be a fruitful direction for building more general models of biodiversity response to climate change.

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          Most cited references57

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          Competitive Exclusion in Herbaceous Vegetation

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            Positive interactions among alpine plants increase with stress.

            Plants can have positive effects on each other. For example, the accumulation of nutrients, provision of shade, amelioration of disturbance, or protection from herbivores by some species can enhance the performance of neighbouring species. Thus the notion that the distributions and abundances of plant species are independent of other species may be inadequate as a theoretical underpinning for understanding species coexistence and diversity. But there have been no large-scale experiments designed to examine the generality of positive interactions in plant communities and their importance relative to competition. Here we show that the biomass, growth and reproduction of alpine plant species are higher when other plants are nearby. In an experiment conducted in subalpine and alpine plant communities with 115 species in 11 different mountain ranges, we find that competition generally, but not exclusively, dominates interactions at lower elevations where conditions are less physically stressful. In contrast, at high elevations where abiotic stress is high the interactions among plants are predominantly positive. Furthermore, across all high and low sites positive interactions are more important at sites with low temperatures in the early summer, but competition prevails at warmer sites.
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              Scaling environmental change through the community-level: a trait-based response-and-effect framework for plants

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
                Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A
                pnas
                pnas
                PNAS
                Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
                National Academy of Sciences
                0027-8424
                1091-6490
                15 September 2020
                31 August 2020
                31 August 2020
                : 117
                : 37
                : 22858-22865
                Affiliations
                [1] aDepartment of Biological Sciences, University of Bergen , 5008 Bergen, Norway;
                [2] bBjerknes Centre for Climate Research, University of Bergen , 5008 Bergen, Norway;
                [3] cNatural History Museum, University of Oslo , N-0318 Oslo, Norway;
                [4] dNorwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA) Oslo, Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, N-0349 Oslo, Norway;
                [5] eFaculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences , N-1432 Ås, Norway;
                [6] fDepartment of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan , Ann Arbor, MI 48104
                Author notes
                1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: vigdis.vandvik@ 123456uib.no .

                Edited by Susan P. Harrison, University of California, Davis, CA, and approved July 21, 2020 (received for review February 21, 2020)

                Author contributions: V.V. and D.E.G. designed research; V.V. and K.K. performed research; V.V., O.S., R.J.T., and A.H.H. analyzed data; and V.V., O.S., K.K., R.J.T., A.H.H., and D.E.G. wrote the paper.

                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4651-4798
                https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9727-1672
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1049-7025
                Article
                202003377
                10.1073/pnas.2003377117
                7502702
                32868426
                777e57f3-455a-46bb-82b8-3378abdf1da6
                Copyright © 2020 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.

                This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).

                History
                Page count
                Pages: 8
                Funding
                Funded by: Norges Forskningsråd (Forskningsrådet) 501100005416
                Award ID: 184912
                Award Recipient : Vigdis Vandvik
                Funded by: Norges Forskningsråd (Forskningsrådet) 501100005416
                Award ID: 244525
                Award Recipient : Vigdis Vandvik
                Categories
                Biological Sciences
                Ecology
                Physical Sciences
                Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
                From the Cover

                colonization,extinction,context dependency,temperature,precipitation

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