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Climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities
Climate change is expected to have profound, partly unforeseeable effects on the composition of functional traits of complex ecosystems, such as coral reefs, and some ecosystem properties are at risk of disappearing. This study applies a novel spatially explicit, individual-based model to explore th...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6403357/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30842480 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-38962-4 |
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author | Kubicek, Andreas Breckling, Broder Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove Reuter, Hauke |
author_facet | Kubicek, Andreas Breckling, Broder Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove Reuter, Hauke |
author_sort | Kubicek, Andreas |
collection | PubMed |
description | Climate change is expected to have profound, partly unforeseeable effects on the composition of functional traits of complex ecosystems, such as coral reefs, and some ecosystem properties are at risk of disappearing. This study applies a novel spatially explicit, individual-based model to explore three critical life history traits of corals: heat tolerance, competitiveness and growth performance under various environmental settings. Building upon these findings, we test the adaptation potential required by a coral community in order to not only survive but also retain its diversity by the end of this century under different IPCC climate scenarios. Even under the most favourable IPCC scenario (Representative Concentration Pathway, RCP 2.6), model results indicate that shifts in the trait space are likely and coral communities will mainly consist of small numbers of temperature-tolerant and fast-growing species. Species composition of coral communities is likely to be determined by heat tolerance, with competitiveness most likely playing a subordinate role. To sustain ~15% of current coral cover under a 2 °C temperature increase by the end of the century (RCP 4.5), coral systems would have to accommodate temperature increases of 0.1–0.15 °C per decade, assuming that periodic extreme thermal events occurred every 8 years. These required adaptation rates are unprecedented and unlikely, given corals’ life-history characteristics. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6403357 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-64033572019-03-08 Climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities Kubicek, Andreas Breckling, Broder Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove Reuter, Hauke Sci Rep Article Climate change is expected to have profound, partly unforeseeable effects on the composition of functional traits of complex ecosystems, such as coral reefs, and some ecosystem properties are at risk of disappearing. This study applies a novel spatially explicit, individual-based model to explore three critical life history traits of corals: heat tolerance, competitiveness and growth performance under various environmental settings. Building upon these findings, we test the adaptation potential required by a coral community in order to not only survive but also retain its diversity by the end of this century under different IPCC climate scenarios. Even under the most favourable IPCC scenario (Representative Concentration Pathway, RCP 2.6), model results indicate that shifts in the trait space are likely and coral communities will mainly consist of small numbers of temperature-tolerant and fast-growing species. Species composition of coral communities is likely to be determined by heat tolerance, with competitiveness most likely playing a subordinate role. To sustain ~15% of current coral cover under a 2 °C temperature increase by the end of the century (RCP 4.5), coral systems would have to accommodate temperature increases of 0.1–0.15 °C per decade, assuming that periodic extreme thermal events occurred every 8 years. These required adaptation rates are unprecedented and unlikely, given corals’ life-history characteristics. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-03-06 /pmc/articles/PMC6403357/ /pubmed/30842480 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-38962-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Kubicek, Andreas Breckling, Broder Hoegh-Guldberg, Ove Reuter, Hauke Climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities |
title | Climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities |
title_full | Climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities |
title_fullStr | Climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities |
title_full_unstemmed | Climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities |
title_short | Climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities |
title_sort | climate change drives trait-shifts in coral reef communities |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6403357/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30842480 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-38962-4 |
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