Identifying ‘climate keystone species’ as a tool for conserving ecological communities under climate change |
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Authors: | Emma-Liina Marjakangas Andrea Santangeli Heini Kujala Stefano Mammola Aleksi Lehikoinen |
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Institution: | 1. The Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland;2. Research Centre for Ecological Change, Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Research Programme, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland |
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Abstract: | Aim Climate change affects ecological communities via impacts on species. The community's response to climate change can be represented as the temporal trend in a climate-related functional property that is quantified using a relevant functional trait. Noteworthy, some species influence this response in the community more strongly than others. Innovation Leveraging on the concept of keystone species, we propose that species with a strong effect on the community's functional response to climate change beyond their relative abundance can be considered as ‘climate keystone species’. We develop a stepwise tool to determine species' effects on a community's climate response and identify climate keystone species. We quantify the species-specific effect by measuring the difference in the community's climate response with and without the species. Next, we identify climate keystone species as those with a strong residual effect after weighting with their relative abundances in the community. Main Conclusions To illustrate the use of the stepwise tool with empirical data, we identify climate keystone species that have a strong effect on the change in the average temperature niche in North American bird communities over time and find the identification tool ecologically relevant. Identification of climate keystone species can serve as an additional conservation method to efficiently protect ecological communities and, in turn, the ecosystem functions they provide. |
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Keywords: | avian community community temperature index conservation prioritization ecosystem function functional trait global change keystone species |
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