Nature's Journal Club

Brian J. Enquist

University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona USA

An ecologist wonders how biotic feedback matters to global-change research.

I have increasingly been drawn to the question of how the biotic world responds to climatic change. In the face of environmental change, biology responds — organisms often compensate, adapt and change the nature of their ecologies. But exactly how important is this biological feedback to how ecosystems respond to a warmer world?

My colleagues and I have called for a need to focus on quantifying the importance of what we call the three As — acclimation, adaptation and assembly — on ecosystem-level processes such as carbon flux.

Acclimation is a plastic response by an organism to a change in the environment, whereas adaptation is the end result of natural selection in populations. Assembly is how species come to dominate a local environment and is the result of ecological interactions. We know that all these processes are affected by changes in climate. The end result of the three As is a group of species that live in a given location and control the flow of resources and energy.

These processes operate on differing time scales and have mostly been studied in isolation. However, two fascinating papers (K. Ishikawa et al. New Phytol. 176, 356–364; 2007, and C. Campbell et al. New Phytol. 176, 375–389; 2007) assess the role of both acclimation processes and between-species adaptation in the responses of photosynthesis and respiration to changing temperature. Remarkably, they find that acclimation and adaptative responses seem to compensate for temperature-driven changes in carbon flux.

Putting these two As together with how species assemble in ecological communities will probably reveal generalities in how evolutionary biology and plant-community ecology matters in global change.

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