Trends in Geographic Sensitivity of Marine Fishes Over Decades in the North Sea

Accounting for biotic interactions is important for predicting species and ecosystem variation under changing climate but difficult to achieve in practice. The proportion of geographical overlap between species, called species geographical sensitivity (SGS), could be used to gauge the potential for...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFrontiers in Marine Science Vol. 8
Main Authors Tu, Chih-Wei, Lai, Yin-Zheng, Chen, Hsiao Chien, Kuo, Chi-Yun, Lee, Pei-Fen, Ko, Chia-Ying
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Lausanne Frontiers Research Foundation 07.02.2022
Frontiers Media S.A
Subjects
Body length
Climate change
Ecosystems
Environmental impact
Fish
geographical interaction
geographical sensitivity
Geography
Marine ecosystems
Marine fish
Morphology
Physiology
Species
species co-occurrence
Temporal variations
North Sea
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Summary:Accounting for biotic interactions is important for predicting species and ecosystem variation under changing climate but difficult to achieve in practice. The proportion of geographical overlap between species, called species geographical sensitivity (SGS), could be used to gauge the potential for species interactions. Species with increasingly high SGS could have the potential to experience more interactions with other species and vice versa, which might have important implications in ecological assessment, particularly at a community level, in the face of climate change. We compiled fish occurrences in the North Sea from 1983 to 2020 and calculated annual mean SGS (mSGS) to systematically evaluate their temporal changes and to estimate influences of species traits on the relative temporal changes in mSGS. The results showed that 36.3% of species significantly changed their mSGS over time, with high correlations between changes in species range size and overlap with other species. The species’ averaged mSGS before warming was highly correlated with the relative change in mSGS. Depth range, body length, and age at maturity together explained most variation in mSGS among these species. Contemporary climate change is expected to reorganize species distributions and interactions and substantially alter marine ecosystem functioning. Our assessment opens a new avenue for evaluating climate change impacts on species geographical interactions, and such geographical changes may be contingent on species traits.
ISSN:2296-7745
2296-7745
DOI:10.3389/fmars.2021.748278