Author Correction: Major restructuring of marine plankton assemblages under global warming

<p>Ceonozoic deep-sea sediment archives from the southwest Pacific have been used to reconstruct regional climatic and environmental changes associated with global warming events from the earliest Eocene to the Last Interglacial. Less attention has been given to the biotic significance of associated changes in microfossil assemblages. Here we report what is currently known of the effects that global warming events have had on regional plankton communities, specifically foraminifera, calcareous nannoplankton, radiolarians and dinoflagellates. We focus on a succession of events representative of different magnitudes of global warming, including the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, early and middle Eocene climatic optima, middle Miocene climatic optimum, mid-Pliocene warm period, and the Last Interglacial. From this study, we hope to establish ways in which the fossil record can be applied to assess the resilience of modern marine plankton communities to current and future global warming.</p>

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Modelling ecosystem adaptation and dangerous rates of global warming

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences ◽

10.1042/etls20180113 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 221-231 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Rebecca Millington ◽

Peter M. Cox ◽

Jonathan R. Moore ◽

Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Global Warming ◽

Diffusion Rate ◽

Individual Species ◽

Genetic Evolution ◽

Rates Of Change ◽

Rapid Climate Change ◽

Warming Climate ◽

Intraspecies Competition ◽

High Trait

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).

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