The Arctic is experiencing some of the fastest rates of warming on the planet. Although many studies have documented responses to such warming by individual species, the idiosyncratic nature of these findings has prevented us from extrapolating them to community-level predictions. Here, we leverage the availability of a long-term dataset from Zackenberg, Greenland (593?700 specimens collected between 1996 and 2014), to investigate how climate parameters influence the abundance of different arthropod groups and overall community composition. We find that variation in mean seasonal temperatures, winter duration and winter freeze-thaw events is correlated with taxon-specific and habitat-dependent changes in arthropod abundances. In addition, we find that arthropod communities have exhibited compositional changes consistent with the expected effects of recent shifts towards warmer active seasons and fewer freeze-thaw events in NE Greenland. Changes in community composition are up to five times more extreme in drier than wet habitats, with herbivores and parasitoids generally increasing in abundance, while the opposite is true for surface detritivores. These results suggest that species interactions and food web dynamics are changing in the Arctic, with potential implications for key ecosystem processes such as decomposition, nutrient cycling and primary productivity.
Notes
Cites: Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2002 Jul 29;357(1423):849-62 PMID 12171648
Cites: Science. 2004 Jan 16;303(5656):353-6 PMID 14726587
Cites: Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2013 Jul 08;368(1624):20120477 PMID 23836784