The importance of facilitative interactions in mediating climate change impact on biodiversity

Abstract

Global change is a multifaceted, unprecedented crisis hitting the life support system of our planet. Among global changes, climate change is regarded as one of the most grave threats to biodiversity because of its direct impacts on species and ecosystems integrity and because of its indirect consequences through synergistic effects with other global change factors such as biological invasions. The challenges presented to either reduce or mitigate this biodiversity crisis derived from climate change require novel synthesis and innovation in ecological and evolutionary theory. Positive species interactions within and between trophic levels can play a key role in the resilience of ecological communities. Depending on the tolerance of nurse species to different aspects of climate change, communities can be more or less resilient to those changes. This knowledge has important implications for both natural communities and agroecosystems. Further, our fundamental understanding of the role of positive interactions can also enable both effective conservation and restoration levers in space and time.This special issue includes studies addressing the role of facilitative interactions on the response of ecological systems to climate change. Key concepts examined included stress, gradients, nurse species, spatial scale, translocation, phylogenetics alongside physiochemicals, and variation in the capacity of species to buffer changes. Alpine, tundra, drylands and temperate forests were directly tested, but salient principles were relevant to all ecosystems including a contribution on soil biota and also a call to more open data and collaborative science. Together, this corpus of work highlighted the significance of facilitative interactions in mitigating many of the effects of climate change on biodiversity.