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Understanding Change in Biodiversity and Consequences for Ecosystem Function University College London, 4th April 2017, 10 AM – 5 PM FINDING THE SYMPOSIUM The symposium is being held in the Anatomy Building at UCL (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps/anatomy-building), in the J Z Young Lecture Theatre. Enter through the main entrance of the Anatomy Building, and there will be a delegate list at reception. The lecture theatre is just behind the reception. SESSION 1: ECOSYSTEM FUNCTION AND ECOSYSTEM SERVICES (CHAIR: TIM NEWBOLD) 10.00 Amanda Bates: Functional shifts in rocky reef communities with warming depend on protection from exploitation and range extension by a habitat-altering urchin Shifts in the abundance and location of species with warming have been documented from the tropics to the poles. Given that such shifts lead to community restructuring with the potential for changes in trophic interactions, it is presently unknown whether habitat protection will promote resilience to global change drivers including warming and invasive species. We take advantage of a natural experiment to test for biodiversity responses in protected and fished temperate reef communities in southeast Australia that have been regularly surveyed over a 21 year period. During this observation window, the region has undergone rapid warming and colonization by a range-extending urchin (Centrostephanus rodgersii) that grazes macroalgal beds and forms extensive rock barrens. We used a generalized additive mixed-effects modelling approach o contrast responses in the community thermal index (CTI, the average realized temperature niche for all species present), invasion status, and different functional groups (trophic level: animals and structural group: algae) at sites with and without protection. Overall, a regional tropicalization has occurred in the brown macroalgae and fishes, particularly so in the sessile invertebrates, detected as an increase in the CTI. The tropicalization signal is due to increases in the local richness and abundance of warm-affinity species, and with increases in the urchin. Protection from fishing, however, strongly influenced the structure of these transitional communities, including colonization by the urchin. Protected communities are distinguished by gaining canopy-forming algae and resisting colonization by small foliose algae, low trophic level warm-water fishes and the urchin. By contrast, herbivorous and omnivorous invertebrates have declined in protected areas and communities where carnivorous fishes and lobsters are most abundant. Our findings thus implicate the role of biological interactions in affecting how communities transition with warming, and highlight the potential for predation to not only decelerate range expansions, but also accelerate range contractions. 10.15 Felix Eigenbrod: A spatially explicit socio-ecological framework for predicting the effects of landscape structure on ecosystem services Understanding the effects of landscape structure (composition and configuration) on ecosystem services (ES) is vital for their sustainable management. Predicting the effects of landscape structure on ES is more challenging than predicting the effects of landscape structure on biodiversity due to the coupled socio-ecological nature of ES. Here, we present an integrative spatially explicit modelling framework that extends John Wien's classical focal patch for predicting the effects of spatial structure on biodiversity to ecosystem services. The central tenet of our framework is that predictive modelling of ES should explicitly consider the spatial scale at which each relevant social and ecological predictors should be measured. In other words, we argue that the key to predictive modelling of ES is to recognize each predictor of the distribution of a given ES has a spatial scale that is most appropriate for assessing its role in determining the distribution of an ES, including relevant components of landscape structure. This approach differs somewhat from most ES modelling frameworks in which predictor variables are assigned to a common scale of analysis. A major benefit of our approach is that it means that the relative contribution of landscape structure on the distributions relative to other predictors can be quantified for a given ES in a given socio-ecological context. Moreover, we hypothesize that a clear understanding of the degree to which the most important spatial scale of different socio-ecological predictors of different ES varies by location will greatly improve the predictive power of spatial models of ES. 10.30 Andy Hector: Biodiversity and ecosystem functioning: From local to landscape Two decades of intensive experimental research have led to consensus that the biodiversity of an ecosystem can influence its functioning and that loss of diversity is usually detrimental. One of the current challenges is to investigate whether these experimental results apply in real-world settings and how they extend to landscape scales. We present new results from a global analysis of the links between alpha and beta diversity and ecosystem multifunctionality in grassland ecosystems using data from the worldwide Nutrient Network. 10.45 Axel Rossberg: How loss of fish biodiversity affects marine ecosystem functioning Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships for fish in large marine ecosystems are difficult to measure. Experiments are ethically prohibitive. Using the world's taxonomically most highly resolved marine food-web model, we therefore obtained quantitative BEF relations from simulated extinction and exploitation experiments (doi:10.1038/ncomms7657). Remarkably, we find that the main interaction shaping the BEF curve, i.e. making it different from a straight line, is not competitive release of the remaining species, as is the case for plant communities, but release from predation. Thus, even though the BEF curves we find for marine fish tend to have saturating forms similar to those known from experiments with plants (with variations depending on the order of extinction), the underlying mechanism is entirely different. We find the reason for this to be that competition of plants for limiting resources leads to approximately symmetric competitive interactions, while indirect interactions among fish by feeding on the underlying complex, structurally unstable food-web of phytoplankton and zoo-plankton can lead to any kind of sign structure for the resulting effective interaction pattern for pairs of fish species. Based on this understanding, we expect similar phenomena for other high-trophic-level functional groups, casting doubt on the transferability of results from simple experiments or simulations with only one or two trophic levels to biodiversity at large. 11.00 Discussion 11.30 Coffee break SESSION 2: PREDICTING CHANGE (CHAIR: ANDY PURVIS) 11.50 Adriana De Palma: PREDICTS models: from species to function and space to time 12.05 Tim Newbold 12.20 Kate Jones: Predicting global emergence and spread of zoonotic diseases Human infectious diseases are a significant threat to global human health and economies (e.g. Ebola, SARs), with the majority of infectious diseases having an animal source (zoonotic). Despite their importance, the lack of a quantitative predictive framework hampers our understanding of how spillovers of zoonotic infectious diseases into the human population will be impacted by global environmental stressors. Although empirical statistical analyses of human infectious diseases have been successful in understanding the spatial environmental correlates of initial outbreaks, a mechanistic understanding of these patterns is lacking at a global scale. Here I present some latest research attempting to merge both empirical and mechanistic approaches at a global scale using data from a poorly understood disease, Lassa fever. I show that macro-scale environmental conditions play an important role in driving the spatial extent of Lassa virus and that any future habitat change to agricultural systems may facilitate a range expansion. I also expand this approach to model zoonotic diseases more generally and examine the impact of future environmental and habitat change on the emergence and spread of zoonotic diseases. 12.35 Discussion 13.00 Lunch break SESSION 3: CHANGE AT THE LEVEL OF ECOSYSTEMS (CHAIR: ADRIANA DE PALMA) 14.00 Nathalie Pettorrelli: Ecosystem functions monitoring: opportunities, challenges and way forward Societal, economic and scientific interests in knowing where biodiversity is, how it is faring and what can be done to efficiently mitigate further biodiversity loss and the associated loss of ecosystem services are at an all-time high. So far, however, biodiversity monitoring has primarily been focused on structural and compositional features of ecosystems despite growing evidence that ecosystem functions are key to elucidating the mechanisms through which biological diversity generates services to humanity. This monitoring gap can be traced to the current lack of consensus on what exactly ecosystem functions are and how to track them at scales beyond the site level. I will here present recent advances made by the GEO BON Ecosystem Function working group to develop a global biodiversity monitoring strategy for ecosystem functions, and discuss current challenges and opportunities. 14.15 Peter Verburg: Land use change: global and regional impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning Land use change encompasses a wide range of different processes ranging from urbanization to agricultural intensification. While most land use changes are seen as a threat to biodiversity and the provisioning of ecosystem services, there are also opportunities. Large scale land abandonment and restoration can release pressures on fragmented natural areas. During the talk I will present the way in which land use models and prioritization tools can be used to explore the role of different land change trajectories and inform the planning of strategies for conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. I will show how spatially explicit analysis allows for the consideration of tradeoffs and the consideration of specific, regional, challenges. 14.30 Cristina Banks-Leite: Intertwined nature: how the making of a community transforms ecosystems In this talk, I will first show how plants, invertebrates, amphibians, birds and mammals are severely impacted by habitat loss and fragmentation in the Atlantic Forest of Brazil. I will then discuss how the use of phylogenies, traits and field experiments can help us better understand the functions that species perform, and the consequences of biodiversity loss to ecosystem functioning. 14.45 Michelle Jackson: Impacts of global warming in freshwaters: from genes to ecosystems With accelerating rates of global warming, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the full range of effects elevated temperatures have on ecosystems. Past research efforts on climate change have focused on individuals or populations, but there has been an expanding emphasis on communities, networks, and whole ecosystems, often providing insight which is only available at this scale. Here I will present preliminary results of the NERC funded ‘Ring of Fire Project’ which is quantifying the impacts of warming in freshwater ecosystems in the Arctic using a genes to whole ecosystem approach. These ecosystems can act as sentinels of change because warming is predicted to be especially rapid at higher latitudes, and freshwaters are particular vulnerable to multiple climate stressors. We use five geothermally heated regions (Iceland, Alaska, Greenland, Kamchatka and Svalbard) as natural laboratories with 60 streams ranging in temperature from 2 to 50oC. These natural laboratories provide the ideal systems to address grand challenges in global change ecology. 15.00 Discussion 15.30 Tea break SESSION 4: POSTERS 15.50 Poster presentations (with wine & nibbles) [Poster] Elizabeth Boakes [Poster] Rodrigo Cámara-Leret: Setting conservation priorities in Indonesian New Guinea New Guinea is the most mountainous and most biodiverse island in the world. Nearly 50% of its 16,000 plant species are endemic and in some families endemism surpasses 70%. Accordingly, understanding how biodiversity is distributed across the island, and how it will cope with increasing land use change and predicted climate change is important for coordinated conservation actions. However, New Guinea remains under-collected and little is known about the geography of endemism and extinction threat. New Guinea is at risk of logging and oil palm development, especially in the flat lowland regions. Past work has focused mostly on the eastern Papua New Guinea side, whereas the western Indonesian sector of the island, including its West Papua province still remains poorly studied. Despite the West Papuan governor and the heads of 12 West Papuan regions declaring West Papua as Indonesia’s first official Conservation Province in October 2015, West Papua has yet to employ an evidence-base approach to demarcating conservation areas and measuring complementarity between areas. Large-scale syntheses are thus essential for setting island-wide conservation priorities, and for evaluating the performance of protected areas under land use and climate change. [Poster] Friederike Clever: Local and Regional Patterns in Fish Community Structure on the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef The importance of coral reefs as centres of biodiversity is well recognised; however, the scale at which specific structures relate to fish diversity patterns remains poorly explored. This study investigates the relative importance of geomorphological reef zones versus entire reef systems in explaining fish communities across three isolated but degraded Caribbean atolls. We compared shallow water (< 6 m) reef fish communities at 93 sites among and within atolls and across five geomorphological reef zones to assess their relative effects on both taxonomic and functional fish diversity. Reef zone explained higher variation in fish communities than atolls; however, taking into account functional traits revealed differences in fish communities among atolls. While reef zones retained a high proportion of the overall functional niche breadth suggesting high functional redundancy in fish communities, most individual trait combinations comprised only few species. Thus, our results indicate high vulnerability to functional loss in Caribbean coral reef fish communities, which agrees with previous findings from research conducted on larger spatial scales. We show that combining geomorphology with functional metrics aids detecting differences fish diversity patterns crucial to conservation and fisheries management. Furthermore, our findings are relevant to the challenge of detecting environmental change-induced community shifts in these important ecosystems. [Poster] Rory Gibb: Projected future trends in Lassa fever, agriculture and carbon storage in West Africa Anthropogenic processes such as land use and climate change are important drivers of many zoonotic and vectorborne diseases. Disease regulation is therefore often framed as an ecosystem service (ES) impacted by changes to ecosystem function and biodiversity (the One Health concept). However, quantitative disease predictions are rarely incorporated into future ES projections, despite the clear need for a fuller understanding of human health impacts of land use and conservation decisions. Here, we apply a recently developed environmental-mechanistic epidemiological model and methods for mapping ES proxies, in order to predict future changes to human Lassa fever, agricultural land use and carbon storage across a gradient of projected land use change in West Africa. Lassa fever is an important neglected viral zoonosis with a high endemic health burden, whose rodent reservoir host is closely associated with agriculture and rural livelihoods. We develop a projected gradient of 2070 landcover-land-use rasters (from low to high intensity of change) by simulating forward from present-day data (20012011). Projected change is dominated by conversion of savannah and forest to cultivated land, expanding suitable habitat area for the Lassa reservoir host. This agricultural expansion is predicted to drive both losses of stored carbon in vegetation and a small increase in human Lassa cases. Human population growth and climate change then act as major drivers of disease, with predicted Lassa cases more than doubling by 2070. While preliminary, our results indicate that incorporating disease regulation into global change and ES projections has potential to improve understanding of the costs of ecosystem change. [Poster] Jack Hatfield: Birds in the matrix – the effects of land use conversion and fragmentation on avian communities Habitat loss and fragmentation is one of the major threats to tropical biodiversity, where native forest is replaced by pasture and exotic tree plantations. The influence of these different matrix types upon the community composition in forest patches is yet to be fully understood, particularly when considering a fragmentation gradient. We investigate these effects by considering the avifauna of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest – a highly fragmented biodiversity hotspot. We surveyed bird species with an interior-edge-matrix grid at 50 sites along a fragmentation gradient. Half of the patches were embedded in a pasture matrix, the other half within Eucalyptus spp. We examine bird α, β and γ diversity and composition in relation to landscape attributes such as connectivity and patch size. We have found 248 bird species so far, although fieldwork is ongoing. Preliminary results indicate a marked difference between the community found in the pasture and Eucalyptus - the latter has lower species richness but is more similar to forest. The trends observed for the patch interior and edge communities resembled those found for the matrix, showing the value of native forest cannot be replaced by non-native open or forested habitats, and that a combination of matrix types is potentially the best overall solution for the regional avifauna. The study results will provide management implications on how best to maintain the highly endemic biodiversity of one of the world’s most endangered realms. [Poster] Hernani Fernandes Magalhães de Oliveira: El Niño induced effects on mutualistic seed dispersal networks The frequency of strong El Niño events is expected to increase due to climate change. These events have contrasting impacts in different world regions; some places become wetter while others become drier. Rainfall is a key factor influencing plant phenology and primary productivity, and is thus expected to have cascading effects on networks of interactions among frugivores and the plant species they feed upon. Higher rainfall tends to produce more modular networks while drier conditions lead to more nested interactions. The El Niño cycle of 2015-2016 was considered one of the strongest on record. In Costa Rica, it caused severe droughts in dry forests of the Pacific coast, and extreme floods in rainforests of the Atlantic coast. To quantify the impact of extreme fluctuations in rainfall associated with El Niño on the structure of mutualistic networks, we studied interactions between frugivorous bats and plants. By applying DNA barcoding to seeds collected from bat guano and pulp, we constructed mutualistic ecological networks. We then ran null simulations to determine changes in network properties across the El Niño period, both within and between the dry and rainforest sites. We found that El Niño led to similar effects on network structure across both forests, but to different effects between seasons within each habitat. Here we highlight the main consequences of drought and flood conditions during an extreme El Niño event on the overall structure of mutualistic networks. [Poster] Katia Sanchez-Ortiz [Poster] Charlotte Selvey Agriculture has both dependencies and impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services, and there is widespread evidence that intensive agriculture causes significant biodiversity loss and degradation of ecosystem services. Changes to farm management, for the enhancement of ecosystem services and food production, is becoming widely discussed within the agricultural and academic worlds. But how much are these services worth in monetary terms? Previous valuation studies have focussed on the value of pollinators in apple orchards, and others have valued the pest control service provided by arthropods. My work focusses on the viability of insectivorous birds providing an economic pest control service to orchards in Herefordhsire. I have measured bird and butterfly abundance, species richness and diversity on 31 orchards across Herefordshire, across four management types: Organic, LEAF, Conventional and Integrated Pest Management (IPM). I then conducted a sentinel prey experiment, using both pastry and plasticine caterpillars, to understand the predation rates on different management types. Preliminary results so far show no difference in pest moth specceis across management types and a significantly higher abundance of insectivorous birds in Organic orchards, taking into account “woody” landscape features. [Poster] Conor Waldock: Using abundance-temperature relationships to predict trophic restructuring of warmer reef systems globally Changing structure of ecological assemblages in response to climate warming may result in changes in trophic interactions, with associated implications for key ecosystem functions. Studies predicting community functional change generally predict changes in species richness or in patterns of occurrence via distribution shifts. Changes in species’ abundances may be more critical to ecological functioning and ubiquitous than changes in species’ occurrences, but are rarely incorporated into ecological models in response to warming. Here we model how temperature limits species’ abundances across their geographic ranges, characterising ‘realised thermal performance’ curves for 4340 shallow reef species globally. We use these in combination with data on community structure from reef sites across the globe to assess potential community-level outcomes of warming on the trophic structure of reef fishes. Net declines in abundance are predicted for communities across the tropics, where species have limited thermal safety margins. Trophic restructuring appears more prevalent where there is net community abundance decline predicted, compared to the few regions of predicted net abundance gain. Idiosyncratic changes across many ecoregions suggest decoupling of thermal structure and trophic structure in general. [Poster] Sarah Whitmee: How can we measure the 'health' of biomes? Identifying a single planetary boundary for biodiversity has proved challenging. The multifaceted nature of biodiversity and the range of spatial scales at which biological systems operate, means that we are unlikely to find a single threshold value or control variable which adequately represents the point at which declines in biodiversity take us outside 'a safe operating space'. Here, we try to operationalise the concept of biome integrity - a set of habitat based, regional metrics that represent the integrity and functioning of a given biome, in relation to the key anthropogenic pressures faced and the fundamental ecological processes which maintain the biome. Using coral reefs as an example, we describe a suggested framework to identify robust control variables for measuring biome integrity and the benefits and drawbacks to implementing such a system to capture an accurate picture of the health of biomes under increasing anthropogenic pressure. [Poster] Rungtip Wonglersak: Modelling the Functional Responses of Predator-Prey Interactions to Climate Change Understanding and predicting the effects of climate change on ecosystems are crucial for conservation policy implementation. The aims of this study are: 1) to explore the most appropriate model for two main components of predator-prey functional response, handling time and attack rate, 2) to develop the Madingley Model by improving the representation of body mass and introducing a representation of temperature into handling time and attack rate and 3) to investigate the plausible impacts of climate change on African ecosystems using the developed Madingley Model. The Madingley Model is a novel general ecosystem model. The model currently predicts the impacts of climate change on ecosystems through metabolic rate. However, climate change can affect ecosystems in other ways, for instance, feeding rates of predators. Literature about the impacts of temperature, predator and prey body mass on handling time and attack rate was searched; data from relevant papers were extracted. These data were analysed using mixed-effects models to select the most appropriate model. New temperature-dependence parameters and updated body-mass-dependence parameter values were incorporated into the original Madingley Model. The new model was used to predict the effects of increasing temperature on African ecosystems. The model prediction showed that increasing temperature has little effect on African ecosystems possibly because of the compensation of metabolic activity to feeding activity.