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Climate Change-Driven Regime Shifts in a Planktonic Food Web
The American Naturalist
|February 24, 2021
Summary
Declining ice cover in lakes alters food web dynamics, shifting from annual to biennial cycles and impacting phytoplankton blooms. Predator-prey interactions are crucial for these ecosystem regime transitions.
Area of Science:
- Ecology
- Limnology
- Environmental Science
Background:
- Global environmental change presents challenges in predicting food web responses due to complex abiotic and biotic interactions.
- Seasonally ice-covered lakes are rapidly warming, leading to significant food web alterations and necessitating forecasting.
- Mechanistic models are valuable tools for understanding how global change impacts species interactions in seasonal ecosystems.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of declining ice cover on the dynamic regimes of seasonally ice-covered lake food webs.
- To determine the role of predator-prey interactions in mediating food web responses to environmental change.
- To validate model predictions using long-term ecological data.
Main Methods:
- Development and application of a seasonally forced food web model incorporating a generalist zooplankton grazer and competing winter/summer phytoplankton.
- Simulation of declining ice cover scenarios to observe shifts in food web dynamics.
- Cluster analysis of long-term data from Lake Baikal to identify historical changes in phytoplankton blooms.
Main Results:
- Declining ice cover induced shifts in food web dynamics, transitioning from annual to biennial cycles.
- Winter phytoplankton blooms decreased and eventually disappeared, with peak biomass shifting to summer.
- Model simulations indicated that predator-prey interactions were essential for regime transitions, unlike simulations without these interactions.
- Lake Baikal data supported model findings, showing a decrease in winter diatom blooms correlating with reduced ice cover.
Conclusions:
- Gradual environmental changes, like reduced ice cover duration, can trigger abrupt or discontinuous regime shifts in aquatic food webs.
- The interplay between abiotic factors (ice cover) and biotic interactions (predator-prey dynamics) is critical for food web stability and response to climate change.
- Seasonally ice-covered lakes are sensitive indicators of global environmental change, exhibiting significant food web restructuring.
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