Ecological acclimation: A framework to integrate fast and slow responses to climate change
Functional Ecology
By: Michael Stemkovski, Joey Bernhardt, Benjamin Wong Blonder, John B. Bradford, Kyra Clark-Wolf, Laura E. Dee, Margaret Evans, Virginia Iglesias, Loretta Johnson, Abigail J. Lynch, Sparkle Malone, Brooke Osborne, Melissa Pastore, Michael Paterson, Malin Pinsky, Christine R. Rollinson, Oliver Selmoni, Jason Venkiteswarnan, Anthony P. Walker, Nicole K. Ward, John B. Williams, Claire Zarakas, and Peter B. Adler
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Abstract
- Ecological responses to climate change occur across vastly different time-scales, from minutes for physiological plasticity to decades or centuries for community turnover and evolutionary adaptation. Accurately predicting the range of ecosystem trajectories will require models that incorporate both fast processes that may keep pace with climate change and slower ones likely to lag behind and generate disequilibrium dynamics. However, the knowledge necessary for this integration is currently fragmented across disciplines.
- We develop ‘ecological acclimation’ as a unifying framework to emphasize the similarity of dynamics driven by processes operating on dramatically different time-scales and levels of biological organization. The framework focuses on ecoclimate sensitivities, measured as the change in an ecological response variable per unit of climate change. Acclimation processes acting at different time-scales cause these sensitivities to shift in magnitude and even direction over time.
- We highlight shifting ecoclimate sensitivities in case studies from diverse ecosystems, including terrestrial plant communities, coral reefs and soil microbiomes.
- Models predicting future ecosystem states inevitably make assumptions about acclimation processes; these assumptions must be explicit for users to evaluate whether a model is appropriate for a given forecast horizon. Similarly, decision frameworks that clearly account for multiple acclimation processes and their distinct time-scales will help natural resource managers plan for ecological impacts of climate change from years to many decades into the future.
- We outline a synthetic research programme focused on the time-scales of ecological acclimation to reduce uncertainty in ecological forecasts.
| Publication type | Article |
|---|---|
| Publication Subtype | Journal Article |
| Title | Ecological acclimation: A framework to integrate fast and slow responses to climate change |
| Series title | Functional Ecology |
| DOI | 10.1111/1365-2435.70079 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 8 |
| Publication Date | June 23, 2025 |
| Year Published | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | British Ecological Society |
| Contributing office(s) | National Climate Adaptation Science Center |
| Description | 17 p. |
| First page | 1923 |
| Last page | 1939 |