Nebraska Cooperative Fish & Wildlife Research Unit
Date of this Version
2016
Citation
Body size distributions signal a regime shift in a lake ecosystem. Proc. R. Soc. B 283: 20160249.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2016.0249
Abstract
Communities of organisms, from mammals to microorganisms, have discontinuous distributions of body size. This pattern of size structuring is a conservative trait of community organization and is a product of processes that occur at multiple spatial and temporal scales. In this study, we assessed whether body size patterns serve as an indicator of a threshold between alternative regimes. Over the past 7000 years, the biological communities of Foy Lake (Montana, USA) have undergone a major regime shift owing to climate change. We used a palaeoecological record of diatom communities to estimate diatom sizes, and then analysed the discontinuous distribution of organism sizes over time. We used Bayesian classification and regression tree models to determine that all time intervals exhibited aggregations of sizes separated by gaps in the distribution and found a significant change in diatom body size distributions approximately 150 years before the identified ecosystem regime shift. We suggest that discontinuity analysis is a useful addition to the suite of tools for the detection of early warning signals of regime shifts.
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Aquaculture and Fisheries Commons, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment Commons, Environmental Monitoring Commons, Natural Resource Economics Commons, Natural Resources and Conservation Commons, Water Resource Management Commons
Comments
Copyright 2016 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.