Improving the community-temperature index as a climate change indicator
- Climate change indicators are tools to assess, visualize and communicate the impacts of climate change on species and communities. Indicators that can be applied to different taxa are particularly useful because they allow comparative analysis to identify which kinds of species are being more affected. A general prediction, supported by empirical data, is that the abundance of warm-adapted species should increase over time, relative to the cool-adapted ones within communities, under increasing ambient temperatures. The community temperature index (CTI) is a community weighted mean of species’ temperature preferences and has been used as an indicator to summarize this temporal shift. The CTI has the advantages of being a simple and generalizable indicator; however, a core problem is that temporal trends in the CTI may not only reflect changes in temperature. This is because species’ temperature preferences often covary with other species attributes, and these other attributes may affect species response to other environmental drivers. Here, we propose a novel model-based approach that separates the effects of temperature preference from the effects of other species attributes on species’ abundances and subsequently on the CTI. Using long-term population data of breeding birds in Denmark and demersal marine fish in the southeastern North Sea, we find differences in CTI trends with the original approach and our model-based approach, which may affect interpretation of climate change impacts. We suggest that our method can be used to test the robustness of CTI trends to the possible effects of other drivers of change, apart from climate change.
Author: | Diana Bowler, Katrin Böhning-GaeseORCiDGND |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-438034 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0184275 |
ISSN: | 1932-6203 |
Pubmed Id: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28898285 |
Parent Title (English): | PLoS one |
Publisher: | PLoS |
Place of publication: | Lawrence, Kan. |
Contributor(s): | Jan Geert Hiddink |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of Publication (online): | 2017/09/25 |
Date of first Publication: | 2017/09/12 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2017/09/25 |
Volume: | 12 |
Issue: | (9): e0184275 |
Page Number: | 17 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 17 |
Note: | Copyright: © 2017 Bowler, Böhning-Gaese. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
HeBIS-PPN: | 419786570 |
Institutes: | Angeschlossene und kooperierende Institutionen / Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft |
Biowissenschaften / Institut für Ökologie, Evolution und Diversität | |
Fachübergreifende Einrichtungen / Biodiversität und Klima Forschungszentrum (BiK-F) | |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 57 Biowissenschaften; Biologie / 570 Biowissenschaften; Biologie |
Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0 |