Department Aquatic Ecology
Warming-related community turnover in freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems
In this Blue-Green-Biodiversity project, funded by the ETH Domain, we quantified and compared the rates of warming-related community turnover occurring in freshwater and terrestrial communities. We analyzed existing data from biodiversity monitoring projects, where the same sites were sampled repeatedly over time. This includes Swiss Biodiversity Monitoring data (BDM), National Lakes Assessment Survey Data (USA EPA), RivFishTime, BioTime, and other published time-series. We set out to understand whether cold-loving taxa are being replaced by warm-loving (thermophilic) taxa, or whether warm-loving taxa are becoming increasingly prevalent. Additionally we investigated the environmental and biological drivers of the signal of "thermophilisation". Does body size determine the rate of turnover? Or are thermal niches and environmental variation important drivers?
This project is a collaboration with Christian Rixen at WSL, and is led by Dr. Imran Khaliq.
We welcome you to read about the results published in Nature Communications here.
