Species’ resilience, plasticity, and adaptation to environmental change.

Abstract

Ecosystems and the services they provide are fundamental to human existence and wellbeing. Increasing anthropogenic activity and demand for services over the last ~70 years has led to humans becoming one of the most significant forces shaping the planet, altering climates, and causing widespread habitat and biodiversity loss. Escalating concern over the fate of ecosystems is resulting in an urgent need to design policies and management strategies to mitigate the effects of anthropogenic activity on ecosystems and the communities that live within them. Such necessity has precipitated a substantial body of research dedicated to increasing our understanding of the complexity of species’ responses to both natural and anthropogenic change, and the impact these responses have on ecosystems and the services they provide. While it is well established that biodiversity is vital to the maintenance of ecosystem health, research linking biodiversity to ecosystem functioning (BEF) shows that ecosystem functioning is mediated more by the diversity and magnitude of ‘traits’ that a population expresses, rather than taxonomic richness of that population. A key issue within BEF research is the tendency to use mean trait values to confer the functional contribution of an entire species or community, omitting measures of intraspecific variation and environmental context which are crucial to understanding species’ potential for plasticity, resilience, and adaptive evolution. Here I demonstrate the inherent variability within and between species and address the growing need to incorporate this variability when investigating a species’ ability to acclimatise and adapt to environmental change. I use functional response traits covering behaviour, morphology, physiology, and reproduction as indicators of short- and long-term changes to fitness and potential resilience under varying environmental contexts. I also use functional effect traits to link organisms’ responses to aspects of ecosystem functioning and demonstrate the inherent variation and context dependency that exists in both the range and magnitude of trait expression. The results presented show that the scale and variability of intraspecific trait expression is highly context-dependent and varies subject to three key factors: 1) temporal context, based on the rate, magnitude, and timing (e.g., season, or stage in a phenological cycle) of when organisms experience environmental pressures; 2) the individual, or suite of traits being investigated; and 3) the environmental history of the population. Collectively my results demonstrate how these factors can impact intraspecific trait expression independently and/ or interactively. In addition, my findings highlight some of the key insights that traits offer in linking multiple levels of biological organisation to the complex processes by which organisms respond to changes in environmental context and the resulting effects on ecosystem processes. I conclude that intraspecific variation, and the factors underpinning it, are vital to understanding how species respond to change. While further investigations to understand the interconnectivity of traits and the context-dependency of their expression across spatial and temporal scales is needed, traits have significant untapped potential. Specifically, a deeper understanding of trait variability can contribute to informing robust environmental policies and management through inclusion in assessments of the sensitivity and vulnerability of communities to human impacts, predictions of species extinction risk, and the identification of resilience in natural systems. Discovering what causes responses to change whether at the individual scale or across ecosystems will help with the development of suites / frameworks of ecologically relevant traits which can be applied across multiple systems to help standardise information gathering and monitoring. Further investigation into the context-dependency of responses across multiple temporal (especially long-term) and spatial scales will allow us to understand species’ potential for resilience, inform intelligent spatial planning, and enable us to set more informed objectives and timelines for management targets to ensure species persistence and the long-term, sustainable provision of ecosystem functions and services.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jasmin Godbold: orcid.org/0000-0001-5558-8188

ORCID for Laura J Grange: orcid.org/0000-0001-9222-6848

ORCID for Cathy Lucas: orcid.org/0000-0002-5929-7481

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