As the climate warms, species are shifting their ranges to match their climatic niches, leading to the warming of ecological communities (thermophilisation). We currently have little understanding of the population-level processes driving this community-level warming, particularly at rapidly warming high latitudes. Using 30 years of high-resolution moth monitoring data across a 1200 km latitudinal gradient in Finland, we find that higher latitude communities are experiencing more rapid thermophilisation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change is altering species' distributions globally. Increasing frequency of extreme weather and climate events (EWCEs) is one of the hallmarks of climate change. Despite species redistribution being widely studied in response to long-term climatic trends, the contribution of EWCEs to range shifts is not well understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change is already leaving a broad footprint of impacts on biodiversity, from an individual caterpillar emerging earlier in spring to dominant plant communities migrating poleward. Despite the various modes of how species are on the move, we primarily document shifting species along only one gradient (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
April 2025
Globally, rising temperatures are increasingly favoring warm-affiliated species. Although changes in community composition are typically measured by the mean temperature affinity of species (the community temperature index, CTI), they may be driven by different processes and accompanied by shifts in the diversity of temperature affinities and breadth of species thermal niches. To resolve the pathways to community warming in Finnish flora and fauna, we examined multidecadal changes in the dominance and diversity of temperature affinities among understory forest plant, freshwater phytoplankton, butterfly, moth, and bird communities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTurnover in species composition through time is a dominant form of biodiversity change, which has profound effects on the functioning of ecological communities. Turnover rates differ markedly among communities, but the drivers of this variation across taxa and realms remain unknown. Here we analyse 42,225 time series of species composition from marine, terrestrial and freshwater assemblages, and show that temporal rates of turnover were consistently faster in locations that experienced faster temperature change, including both warming and cooling.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProtected areas are considered fundamental to counter biodiversity loss. However, evidence for their effectiveness in averting local extinctions remains scarce and taxonomically biased. We employ a robust counterfactual multi-taxon approach to compare occupancy patterns of 638 species, including birds (150), mammals (23), plants (39) and phytoplankton (426) between protected and unprotected sites across four decades in Finland.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: The Arctic is warming at an alarming rate. While changes in plant community composition and phenology have been extensively reported, the effects of climate change on reproduction remain poorly understood. We quantified multidecadal changes in flower density for nine tundra plant species at a low- and a high-Arctic site in Greenland.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
July 2023
Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc
August 2023
Ecologists routinely use statistical models to detect and explain interactions among ecological drivers, with a goal to evaluate whether an effect of interest changes in sign or magnitude in different contexts. Two fundamental properties of interactions are often overlooked during the process of hypothesising, visualising and interpreting interactions between drivers: the measurement scale - whether a response is analysed on an additive or multiplicative scale, such as a ratio or logarithmic scale; and the symmetry - whether dependencies are considered in both directions. Overlooking these properties can lead to one or more of three inferential errors: misinterpretation of (i) the detection and magnitude (Type-D error), and (ii) the sign of effect modification (Type-S error); and (iii) misidentification of the underlying processes (Type-A error).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlob Chang Biol
January 2022
The species composition of plant and animal assemblages across the globe has changed substantially over the past century. How do the dynamics of individual species cause this change? We classified species into seven unique categories of temporal dynamics based on the ordered sequence of presences and absences that each species contributes to an assemblage time series. We applied this framework to 14,434 species trajectories comprising 280 assemblages of temperate marine fishes surveyed annually for 20 or more years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
August 2020
Breeding timed to match optimal resource abundance is vital for the successful reproduction of species, and breeding is therefore sensitive to environmental cues. As the timing of breeding shifts with a changing climate, this may not only affect the onset of breeding but also its termination, and thus the length of the breeding period. We use an extensive dataset of over 820K nesting records of 73 bird species across the boreal region in Finland to probe for changes in the beginning, end, and duration of the breeding period over four decades (1975 to 2017).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSpatially distinct pairs of sites may have similarly fluctuating population dynamics across large geographical distances, a phenomenon called spatial synchrony. However, species rarely exist in isolation, but rather as members of interactive communities, linked with other communities through dispersal (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change is reshaping global biodiversity as species respond to changing temperatures. However, the net effects of climate-driven species redistribution on local assemblage diversity remain unknown. Here, we relate trends in species richness and abundance from 21,500 terrestrial and marine assemblage time series across temperate regions (23.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScenario-based biodiversity modelling is a powerful approach to evaluate how possible future socio-economic developments may affect biodiversity. Here, we evaluated the changes in terrestrial biodiversity intactness, expressed by the mean species abundance (MSA) metric, resulting from three of the shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) combined with different levels of climate change (according to representative concentration pathways [RCPs]): a future oriented towards sustainability (SSP1xRCP2.6), a future determined by a politically divided world (SSP3xRCP6.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman activities are fundamentally altering biodiversity. Projections of declines at the global scale are contrasted by highly variable trends at local scales, suggesting that biodiversity change may be spatially structured. Here, we examined spatial variation in species richness and composition change using more than 50,000 biodiversity time series from 239 studies and found clear geographic variation in biodiversity change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotivation: The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series.
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