Rate of environmental change across scales in ecology

Abstract

The rate of change (RoC) of environmental drivers matters: biotic and abiotic components respond differently when faced with a fast or slow change in their environment. This phenomenon occurs across spatial scales and thus levels of ecological organization. We investigated the RoC of environmental drivers in the ecological literature and examined publication trends across ecological levels, including prevalent types of evidence and drivers. Research interest in environmental driver RoC has increased over time (particularly in the last decade), however, the amount of research and type of studies were not equally distributed across levels of organization and different subfields of ecology use temporal terminology (e.g. 'abrupt' and 'gradual') differently, making it difficult to compare studies. At the level of individual organisms, evidence indicates that responses and underlying mechanisms are different when environmental driver treatments are applied at different rates, thus we propose including a time dimension into reaction norms. There is much less experimental evidence at higher levels of ecological organization (i.e. population, community, ecosystem), although theoretical work at the population level indicates the importance of RoC for evolutionary responses. We identified very few studies at the community and ecosystem levels, although existing evidence indicates that driver RoC is important at these scales and potentially could be particularly important for some processes, such as community stability and cascade effects. We recommend shifting from a categorical (e.g. abruptversusgradual) to a quantitative and continuous (e.g. degrees C/h) RoC framework and explicit reporting of RoC parameters, including magnitude, duration and start and end points to ease cross-scale synthesis and alleviate ambiguity. Understanding how driver RoC affects individuals, populations, communities and ecosystems, and furthermore how these effects can feed back between levels is critical to making improved predictions about ecological responses to global change drivers. The application of a unified quantitative RoC framework for ecological studies investigating environmental driver RoC will both allow cross-scale synthesis to be accomplished more easily and has the potential for the generation of novel hypotheses.