Climate change threats to the global functional diversity of freshwater fish

Climate change impacts on freshwater ecosystems and freshwater biodiversity show strong spatial variability, highlighting the importance of a global perspective. While previous studies on biodiversity mostly focused on species richness, functional diversity, which is a better predictor of ecosystem functioning, has received much less attention. This study aims to comprehensively assess climate change threats to the functional diversity of freshwater fish across the world, considering three complementary metrics—functional richness, evenness and divergence. We built on existing spatially explicit projections of geographical ranges for 11,425 riverine fish species as affected by changes in streamflow and water temperature extremes at four warming levels (1.5°C, 2.0°C, 3.2°C and 4.5°C). To estimate functional diversity, we considered the following four continuous, morphological and physiological traits: relative head length, relative body depth, trophic level and relative growth rate. Together, these traits cover five ecological functions. We treated missing trait values in two different ways: we either removed species with missing trait values or imputed them. Depending on the warming level, 6%–25% of the locations globally face a complete loss of functional diversity when assuming no dispersal (6%–17% when assuming maximal dispersal), with hotspots in the Amazon and Paraná River basins. The three facets of functional diversity do not always follow the same pattern. Sometimes, functional richness is not yet affected despite species loss, while functional evenness and divergence are already reducing. Other times, functional richness reduces, while functional evenness and/or divergence increase instead. The contrasting patterns of the three facets of functional diversity show their complementarity among each other and their added value compared to species richness. With increasing climate change, impacts on freshwater communities accelerate, making early mitigation critically important.