A temperature-dependent metacommunity framework for understanding
biodiversity change with warming
Abstract
A current challenge in ecology is to understand and predict how species
abundance and diversity change with rapidly shifting temperature
regimes. Temperature affects the local and regional dynamics underlying
community structure in predictable ways, but whether this translates to
predictable community-level outcomes with warming remains an open
question. We address this gap with a framework that draws from metabolic
theory to model temperature-dependent metacommunity
processes—density-independent population growth, density-dependent
biotic interactions, and dispersal—and their effects on diversity
patterns. We simulated metacommunity dynamics to show how species
richness, relative abundance, and beta diversity respond to up to 10°C
warming, exploring effects of variation in thermal response curves for
different metacommunity processes. We demonstrate how factors such as
thermal safety margins and thermal asymmetries among metacommunity
processes mediate the magnitude of this change. Our framework highlights
the importance of incorporating dispersal and species interactions, as
well as accurately identifying their thermal response curves, in
predictive models of diversity change.