Professor University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Abstract: Calls for more mechanistic models of how temperature is expected to change species diversity and abundance in ecological communities requires synthesis of different ecological frameworks describing the effect of warming on diversity across scales. Two frameworks- the Metabolic Theory of Ecology, and Metacommunity Theory- have the potential to fill this theoretical gap by linking temperature’s fundamental effect on metabolism and life history traits with local and regional processes that jointly drive community diversity: density-independent abiotic responses, density-dependent species interactions, and dispersal. We used new and existing theory to develop a model of temperature-dependent metacommunity dynamics, highlighting how each of these three processes depend on temperature based on Metabolic Theory expectations. We then simulated metacommunity dynamics under warming to show how species richness, relative abundance, and turnover across space are expected to respond to up to ten degrees of warming, exploring different context-dependent scenarios that ecologists may encounter in their systems including different dispersal rates, species interaction matrices, and thermal asymmetries among consumers and resources. Our approach can be used to generate testable hypotheses about the temperature dependence of diversity-maintaining processes.
