A cross-taxa assessment of the impact of climate change on population abundance

预测气候变化对物种的影响是当代生态学家最重要的问题之一。由于几十年来气温一直在上升，我们可以利用已经在群落中观察到的变化来确定哪些物种最有可能处于危险之中。目前公认的气候变化的三个主要特征是：物候的进展、向极地的范围转移和相对丰富度向暖适应物种的群落转移。前两种指纹受到了相当多的关注，而第三种指纹受到的关注要少得多。尽管如此，丰度的变化将对当地，甚至可能是全球的物种灭绝风险产生直接影响。在这个项目中，我们将与多位科学家合作，汇集中欧不同物种的长期种群数据集，以评估和比较气候变化对种群丰度的影响。我们的项目将包括来自陆地、海洋和淡水系统和物种的数据，如弹尾虫和地面甲虫，这些物种对气候变化的影响知之甚少。我们首先通过测试种群趋势与物种温度生态位之间的关系，以及预测暖适应物种比冷适应物种更成功，来询问气候变化信号是否可被检测到。温度生态位对人口趋势的重要性将与其他属性（如栖息地偏好）的重要性进行比较，这些属性可能表明其他环境驱动因素（如土地利用变化）的影响。人们越来越认识到物种属性（生态、形态、生理和生活史）将改变对气候变化的反应。我们将测试哪些物种属性改变了温度生态位和种群趋势之间关系的强度，这将使我们能够推断哪些类型的物种对气候变化的反应更快或更慢。最后，我们将测试不同分类类群的群落温度指数（CTI；群落平均温度生态位）的效用。CTI是一个潜在的有价值的气候变化影响指标，特别是作为公众和决策者的沟通工具。然而，温度生态位与其他物种属性之间的协变影响了其应用。我们的目标是开发一个校正的CTI，考虑这种协变重新评估其价值。该项目有助于我们了解气候变化对群落的影响，确定最危险的分类群和生态系统，并指导保护重点。

Predicting the impacts of climate change on species is one of the most important contemporary questions for ecologists. As temperatures have already been increasing for several decades, we can make use of the changes already observed in communities to identify which species are most likely at risk. There are three main recognized fingerprints of climate change: advances in phenology, pole-ward range shifts and community shifts of relative abundance toward warm-adapted species. The first two of these fingerprints have received considerable attention while the third has received much less. Nonetheless, changes in abundance will have direct impacts on local, and probably also global, extinction risk. In this project, we will collaborate with multiple scientists, bringing together long-term population data sets of different species within Central Europe, to assess and compare the impacts of climate change on population abundances. Our project will include data from terrestrial, marine and freshwater systems and species, such as springtails and ground beetles, for which climate change impacts are less understood. We first ask whether climate change signals are detectable by testing the relationship between population trend and species temperature niche and the prediction that warm-adapted species have been more successful than cool-adapted species. The importance of temperature niche for population trends will be compared with the importance of other attributes (such as habitat preference) that might indicate the effect of other environmental drivers (such as land use change). It is increasingly being recognized that species attributes (their ecology, morphology, physiology and life history) will modify responses to climate change. We will test what species attributes modify the strength of the relationship between temperature niche and population trend, which will allow us to infer which types of species are responding faster or slower to climate change. Finally, we will test the utility of the community temperature index (CTI; community averaged temperature niche) for different taxonomic groups. The CTI is a potentially valuable indicator of climate change impacts, especially as a communication tool for the general public and policy makers. However, covariation between temperature niche and other species attributes hinders its application. We aim to develop a corrected CTI that considers this covariation for reassessment of its value. This project contributes to our understanding of how communities are impacted by climate change, for identifying the taxonomic groups and ecosystems most at risk and for directing conservation priorities.