Macroecological patterns of resilience inferred from a multinational, synchronized experiment

The likelihood of an ecological system to undergo undesired regime shifts is expected to increase as climate change effects unfold. To understand how regional climate settings can affect resilience; i.e., the ability of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbances without changing its original structure and processes, we used a synchronized mesocosm experiment (representative of shallow lakes) along a latitudinal gradient. We manipulated nutrient concentrations and water levels in a synchronized mesocosm experiment in different climate zones across Europe involving Sweden, Estonia, Germany, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Greece. We assessed attributes of zooplankton communities that might contribute to resilience under different ecological configurations. We assessed four indicator of relative ecological resilience (cross-scale, within-scale structures, aggregation length and gap size) of zooplankton communities, inferred from discontinuity analysis. Similar resilience attributes were found across experimental treatments and countries, except Greece, which experienced severe drought conditions during the experiment. These conditions apparently led to a lower relative resilience in the Greek mesocosms. Our results indicate that zooplankton community resilience in shallow lakes is marginally affected by water level and the studied nutrient range unless extreme drought occurs. In practice, this means that drought mitigation could be especially challenging in semi-arid countries in the future

Macroecological Patterns of Resilience Inferred from a Multinational, Synchronized Experiment

The likelihood of an ecological system to undergo undesired regime shifts is expected to increase as climate change effects unfold. To understand how regional climate settings can affect resilience; i.e., the ability of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbances without changing its original structure and processes, we used a synchronized mesocosm experiment (representative of shallow lakes) along a latitudinal gradient. We manipulated nutrient concentrations and water levels in a synchronized mesocosm experiment in different climate zones across Europe involving Sweden, Estonia, Germany, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Greece. We assessed attributes of zooplankton communities that might contribute to resilience under different ecological configurations. We assessed four indicator of relative ecological resilience (cross-scale, within-scale structures, aggregation length and gap size) of zooplankton communities, inferred from discontinuity analysis. Similar resilience attributes were found across experimental treatments and countries, except Greece, which experienced severe drought conditions during the experiment. These conditions apparently led to a lower relative resilience in the Greek mesocosms. Our results indicate that zooplankton community resilience in shallow lakes is marginally affected by water level and the studied nutrient range unless extreme drought occurs. In practice, this means that drought mitigation could be especially challenging in semi-arid countries in the future

Investigation of zooplankton community and size structure in different nutrient and water level among latitudinal gradient a mesocosm experiment

Higher temperature could have severe impact on ecosystem function as consequences of community changes. Thus lakes are very sensitive to warming. We assessed the effects of nutrient and water level changes on zooplankton community composition and size structure in different climate zones by running a standardised controlled six-month experiment in six countries. The mesocosms were established with two different nutrient levels and two depths, all run with four replicates. We analysed pooled zooplankton samples originating from monthly samplings of each mesocosm throughout the study period. We found a significant effect of temperature on the community composition and size structure of the zooplankton. However, no water depth and nutrient effect appeared. In all countries except for Greece, zooplankton community biomass was mostly dominated by cladocerans. The normalised size spectrum (NSS) slope increased with temperature but did not differ among depths or nutrient levels. The slope of NSS was shallower in Greece than in the other countries. Neither taxonomic diversity nor size diversity showed clear pattern at different nutrient or depth level along temperature gradient. However, genus richness decreased through warmer regions. Our experiment generall

Macroecological Patterns of Resilience Inferred from a Multinational, Synchronized Experiment

The likelihood of an ecological system to undergo undesired regime shifts is expected to increase as climate change effects unfold. To understand how regional climate settings can affect resilience; i.e., the ability of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbances without changing its original structure and processes, we used a synchronized mesocosm experiment (representative of shallow lakes) along a latitudinal gradient. We manipulated nutrient concentrations and water levels in a synchronized mesocosm experiment in different climate zones across Europe involving Sweden, Estonia, Germany, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Greece. We assessed attributes of zooplankton communities that might contribute to resilience under different ecological configurations. We assessed four indicator of relative ecological resilience (cross-scale, within-scale structures, aggregation length and gap size) of zooplankton communities, inferred from discontinuity analysis. Similar resilience attributes were found across experimental treatments and countries, except Greece, which experienced severe drought conditions during the experiment. These conditions apparently led to a lower relative resilience in the Greek mesocosms. Our results indicate that zooplankton community resilience in shallow lakes is marginally affected by water level and the studied nutrient range unless extreme drought occurs. In practice, this means that drought mitigation could be especially challenging in semi-arid countries in the future