ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2012
Climate change impacts in multispecies systems: drought alters food web size structure in a field experiment.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Network rewiring conserves the topology of drought-impaired food webs.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Effects of Extreme Climatic Events on Evolutionary Processes.Global change biology · 2025Review
- DNA Metabarcoding as a Tool to Study Plankton Responses to Warming and Salinity Change in Mesocosms.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Deciphering Probabilistic Species Interaction Networks.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Predicting population-level impacts of projected climate heating on a temperate freshwater fish.Journal of fish biology · 2024Article
- The overlooked complexity of avian brood parasite-host relationships.Ecology letters · 2022Review
- Diversity and temperature indirectly reduce COOecologia · 2020Article
- Quantifying the effects of climate and anthropogenic change on regional species loss in China.PloS one · 2018Article
- Climate change could drive marine food web collapse through altered trophic flows and cyanobacterial proliferation.PLoS biology · 2018Article
- Climate extremes are associated with invertebrate taxonomic and functional composition in mountain lakes.Ecology and evolution · 2016Article
- The effects of climatic fluctuations and extreme events on running water ecosystems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Trade-offs between growth and maturation: the cost of reproduction for surviving environmental extremes.Oecologia · 2015Article
- FORUM: Ecological networks: the missing links in biomonitoring science.The Journal of applied ecology · 2014Article
- Tolerance to high temperature extremes in an invasive lace bug, Corythucha ciliata (Hemiptera: Tingidae), in subtropical China.PloS one · 2013Article
- Avian community responses to variability in river hydrology.PloS one · 2013Article
- Food web structure in a harsh glacier-fed river.PloS one · 2013Article
- Climate change in metacommunities: dispersal gives double-sided effects on persistence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2012Article
- Climate change in size-structured ecosystems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2012Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Experimental data from intergenerational field manipulations of entire food webs are scarce, yet such approaches are essential for gauging impacts of environmental change in natural systems. We imposed 2 years of intermittent drought on stream channels in a replicated field trial, to measure food web responses to simulated climate change. Drought triggered widespread losses of species and links, with larger taxa and those that were rare for their size, many of which were predatory, being especially vulnerable. Many network properties, including size-scaling relationships within food chains, changed in response to drought. Other properties, such as connectance, were unaffected. These findings highlight the need for detailed experimental data from different organizational levels, from pairwise links to the entire food web. The loss of not only large species, but also those that were rare for their size, provides a newly refined way to gauge likely impacts that may be applied more generally to other systems and/or impacts.
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Registered trials
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