Common species link global ecosystems to climate change: dynamical evidence in the planktonic fossil record.

ABSTRACT: Common species shape the world around us, and changes in their commonness signify large-scale shifts in ecosystem structure and function. However, our understanding of long-term ecosystem response to environmental forcing in the deep past is centred on species richness, neglecting the disproportional impact of common species. Here, we use common and widespread species of planktonic foraminifera in deep-sea sediments to track changes in observed global occupancy (proportion of sampled sites at which a species is present and observed) through the turbulent climatic history of the last 65 Myr. Our approach is sensitive to relative changes in global abundance of the species set and robust to factors that bias richness estimators. Using three independent methods for detecting causality, we show

SUBMITTER: Hannisdal B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5524498 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature