Better explicating the strengths and shortcomings of these models will help refine projections and improve transparency in the years ahead.
Image credit: Witsawat.S.
Edited by David L. Denlinger, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, and approved November 21, 2017 (received for review September 4, 2017)
Significance
How climate change and biological invasions interact to affect biodiversity is of major concern to conservation. Quantitative evidence for the nature of climate change–invasion interactions is, however, limited. For the soil ecosystem fauna, such evidence is nonexistent. Yet across the globe, soil-dwelling animals regulate belowground functioning and have pronounced influences on aboveground dynamics. Using springtails as an exemplar taxon, widely known to have species-specific effects on below- and aboveground dynamics, we show that across a wide latitudinal span (16–54°S), alien species have greater ability to tolerate climate change-associated warming than do their indigenous counterparts. The consequences of such consistent differences are profound given globally significant invasions of soil systems by springtails.
Abstract
Soil systems are being increasingly exposed to the interactive effects of biological invasions and climate change, with rising temperatures expected to benefit alien over indigenous species. We assessed this expectation for an important soil-dwelling group, the springtails, by determining whether alien species show broader thermal tolerance limits and greater tolerance to climate warming than their indigenous counterparts. We found that, from the tropics to the sub-Antarctic, alien species have the broadest thermal tolerances and greatest tolerance to environmental warming. Both groups of species show little phenotypic plasticity or potential for evolutionary change in tolerance to high temperature. These trait differences between alien and indigenous species suggest that biological invasions will exacerbate the impacts of climate change on soil systems, with profound implications for terrestrial ecosystem functioning.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: charlene.janionscheepers{at}monash.edu.
Author contributions: C.J.-S., L.P., C.M.S., and S.L.C. designed research; C.J.-S., L.P., C.M.S., R.H., and S.L.C. performed research; C.J.-S., L.P., G.A.D., and S.L.C. analyzed data; and C.J.-S., L.P., C.M.S., G.A.D., R.H., and S.L.C. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data used for this work are deposited in Monash Figshare (10.4225/03/59fa71b5291c8).
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1715598115/-/DCSupplemental.
- Copyright © 2017 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
Basal resistance enhances tolerance of aliens
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