Identifying 'climate keystone species' as a tool for conserving ecosystem functioning under climate change

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dc.contributor.affiliationUniversity of Helsinki-Lehikoinen, Aleksi
dc.contributor.authorLehikoinen, Aleksi
dc.date.accessioned2025-04-29T14:00:07Z
dc.date.issued2023-08-25
dc.date.issued2023-08-25
dc.descriptionAim: Climate change affects ecological communities via impacts on species. The community's response to climate change can be represented as the temporal trend in a climate-related functional property that is quantified using a relevant functional trait. Noteworthy, some species influence this response in the community more strongly than others. Innovation: Leveraging on the concept of keystone species, we propose that species with a strong effect on the community's functional response to climate change beyond their relative abundance can be considered as 'climate keystone species'. We develop a stepwise tool to determine species' effects on a community's climate response and identify climate keystone species. We quantify the species-specific effect by measuring the difference in the community's climate response with and without the species. Next, we identify climate keystone species as those with a strong residual effect after weighting with their relative abundances in the community. Main Conclusions: To illustrate the use of the stepwise tool with empirical data, we identify climate keystone species that have a strong effect on the change in the average temperature niche in North American bird communities over time and find the identification tool ecologically relevant. Identification of climate keystone species can serve as an additional conservation method to efficiently protect ecosystem functions.
dc.identifierhttps://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h9w0vt4mq
dc.identifier.urihttps://datakatalogi.helsinki.fi/handle/123456789/4628
dc.rights.licensecc-zero
dc.subjectavian community
dc.subjectCommunity Temperature Index
dc.subjectconservation prioritization
dc.subjectecosystem function
dc.subjectGlobal Change
dc.subjectkeystone species
dc.titleIdentifying 'climate keystone species' as a tool for conserving ecosystem functioning under climate change
dc.typedataset

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