Search

Climate change is negatively impacting ecosystems and their contributions to human well‐being, known as ecosystem services. Previous research has mainly focused on the direct effects of climate change on species and ecosystem services, leaving a gap in understanding the indirect impacts resulting from changes in species interactions within complex ecosystems. This knowledge gap is significant because the loss of a species in a food web can lead to additional species losses or "co‐extinctions," particularly when the species most impacted by climate change are also the species that play critical roles in food web persistence or provide ecosystem services. Here, we present a framework to investigate the relationships among species vulnerability to climate change, their roles within the food web, their contributions to ecosystem services, and the overall persistence of these systems and services in the face of climate‐induced species losses. To do this, we assess the robustness of food webs and their associated ecosystem services to climate‐driven species extinctions in eight empirical rocky intertidal food webs. Across food webs, we find that highly connected species are not the most vulnerable to climate change. However, we find species that directly provide ecosystem services are more vulnerable to climate change and more connected than species that do not directly provide services, which results in ecosystem service provision collapsing before food webs. Overall, we find that food webs are more robust to climate change than the ecosystem services they provide and show that combining species roles in food webs and services with their vulnerability to climate change offer predictions about the impacts of co‐extinctions for future food web and ecosystem service persistence. However, these conclusions are limited by data availability and quality, underscoring the need for more comprehensive data collection on linking species roles in interaction networks and their vulnerabilities to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological communities are increasingly subject to natural and human‐induced additions of species, as species shift their ranges under climate change, are introduced for conservation and are unintentionally moved by humans. As such, decisions about how to manage ecosystems subject to species introductions and considering multiple management objectives need to be made. However, the impacts of gaining new species on ecological communities are difficult to predict due to uncertainty in introduced species characteristics, the novel interactions that will be produced by that species, and the recipient ecosystem structure. Drawing on ecological and conservation decision theory, we synthesise literature into a conceptual framework for species introduction decision‐making based on ecological networks in high‐uncertainty contexts. We demonstrate the application of this framework to a theoretical decision surrounding assisted migration considering both biodiversity and ecosystem service objectives. We show that this framework can be used to evaluate trade‐offs between outcomes, predict worst‐case scenarios, suggest when one should collect additional data, and allow for improving knowledge of the system over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human-driven threats are changing biodiversity, impacting ecosystem services. The loss of one species can trigger secondary extinctions of additional species, because species interact--yet the consequences of these secondary extinctions for services remain underexplored. Herein, we compare robustness of food webs and the ecosystem services (hereafter 'services') they provide; and investigate factors determining service responses to secondary extinctions. Simulating twelve extinction scenarios for estuarine food webs with seven services, we find that food web and service robustness are highly correlated, but that robustness varies across services depending on their trophic level and redundancy. Further, we find that species providing services do not play a critical role in stabilizing food webs -- whereas species playing supporting roles in services through interactions are critical to the robustness of both food webs and services. Together, our results reveal indirect risks to services through secondary species losses and predictable differences in vulnerability across services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biodiversity plays important roles in nature's contributions to people (i.e., ecosystem services), but the critical details of how biodiversity contributes are challenging to determine. Efforts to identify the components of an ecosystem that provide services have improved our understanding of which species, functional groups, population, or habitats directly provide services. However, species do not exist in isolation and considerably less is known about how species indirectly influence ecosystem services through interacting with those species directly providing services. This uncertainty is even greater when considering that species interact in complex networks. As such, detailed analyses of species interdependencies are rarely included in ecosystem services assessments or conservation decisions. To date, most studies on food webs and on ecosystem services have developed largely in parallel for many services, but these fields and data are ripe for empirical integration. To further this integration, we compiled data sets that linked three existing ecological networks to seven ecosystem functions and services: wave attenuation, shoreline stabilization, carbon sequestration, water filtration, fisheries, birdwatching, and waterfowl hunting. We leveraged high‐resolution ecological interaction network data sets from three coastal salt marsh ecosystems including detailed species information (e.g., consumer strategy, body size, biomass) on several hundred species from Carpinteria Salt Marsh in California, USA, and for Estero de Punta Banda and Bahia Falsa in Baja, Mexico from Hechinger et al. (2011). Through an extensive literature synthesis and use of citizen science data, we identified which species in the Hechinger et al. (2011) data provided each ecosystem services directly. We augmented the Hechinger et al. (2011) data published in Ecology, particularly the link (or edge) list to include species—service links to indicate a species providing a service, in which species are listed as "Resources" and services are listed as "Consumers." Connecting these data to the previously published ecological networks with species interactions (i.e., trophic, parasitism) formed a topological network with species and service nodes. We also provided a protocol for assigning services to ecological networks that can be used in other ecosystems. This data set provides a step toward advancing the knowledge of important supporting species for ecosystem services and to developing new ecological network methods for ecosystem services. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite this data paper when the data are used in publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social–ecological networks (SENs) represent the complex relationships between ecological and social systems and are a useful tool for analyzing and managing ecosystem services. However, mainstreaming the application of SENs in ecosystem service research has been hindered by a lack of clarity about how to match research questions to ecosystem service conceptualizations in SEN (i.e., as nodes, links, attributes, or emergent properties). Building from different disciplines, we propose a typology to represent ecosystem service in SENs and identify opportunities and challenges of using SENs in ecosystem service research. Our typology provides guidance for this growing field to improve research design and increase the breadth of questions that can be addressed with SEN to understand human–nature interdependencies in a changing world. Social–ecological networks (SENs) provide a promising approach to represent the complex ecological, social, and social–ecological relationships that influence ecosystems service supply. Ecosystem services can be represented in SENs as nodes, links, attributes, or as emergent properties of the network, each bringing distinct aspects of ecosystem services into focus to address different questions. Applications of SENs in ecosystem service research can foster: (i) understanding of the social and ecological drivers of ecosystem services; (ii) forecasting of the impacts of stressors; (iii) investigation of trade-offs between ecosystem services; and (iv) assessment of the effects of alternative management options. Ecosystem service research would benefit from a typology to conceptualize particular ecosystem services in SEN analyses and from greater clarity of when ecosystem service research can benefit from a SEN approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]