Temperature Effects on Ecological Dynamics

Temperature is a principal driver of ecological processes, influencing organismal physiology, species interactions and ecosystem functioning across scales. Rising temperatures accelerate metabolic rates in ectotherms, alter growth and reproductive schedules, and shift competitive hierarchies. At the community level, warming can erode stability, modify trophic structure and simplify food webs by disproportionately affecting higher trophic levels. In aquatic and terrestrial systems alike, temperature changes influence biodiversity patterns, from microbial richness to phytoplankton competition and the performance of apex predators. Natural thermal gradients and manipulative experiments reveal that warming often reduces structural integrity and temporal consistency of species networks, shifts energy flow pathways and alters connectance among trophic groups. Understanding these dynamics is essential for predicting responses of ecosystems to climate change, guiding conservation strategies and maintaining ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration and fisheries productivity.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent investigations into planktonic food webs have shown that warmer conditions decrease both structural stability—defined by the persistence of interaction networks—and temporal stability, reflected in year-to-year consistency of species abundances. Warming intensified the contributions of predators and consumers to instability, while biodiversity effects remained inconsistent. Another field study embedding temperature treatments within a natural stream gradient demonstrated that warming amplifies trophic cascades driven by apex fish predators. Under elevated temperatures, loss of consumer species led to declines in connectance and mean trophic level, revealing that indirect biotic interactions underlie much of the ecosystem response to warming. A global comparative analysis further identified temperature, rather than latitude, as a dominant predictor of food web structure: higher temperatures directly reduce species richness and basal species proportions, while indirectly increasing omnivory and network connectance through these primary effects.

Temperature Effects on Ecological Dynamics publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in temperature effects on ecological dynamics across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Structural stability: The capacity of an ecological network to maintain its pattern of interactions and resist perturbations.

Temporal stability: The consistency of species abundances or ecosystem functions over time.

Trophic cascade: A series of indirect effects in a food web initiated by changes in abundance or behaviour at one trophic level.

Connectance: The proportion of all possible feeding links among species that are actually realised in a network.

Thermal performance curve: A graphical representation of how a biological rate (such as growth or metabolism) varies with temperature.

References

1. Relationships of temperature and biodiversity with stability of natural aquatic food webs. Nature Communications (2023).
2. Warming indirectly simplifies food webs through effects on apex predators. Nature Ecology & Evolution (2023).
3. Temperature directly and indirectly influences food web structure. Scientific Reports (2019).
4. Warming reduces trophic diversity in high‐latitude food webs. Global Change Biology (2024).
5. Variation in thermal physiology can drive the temperature-dependence of microbial community richness. eLife (2024).
6. Effects of experimental warming on biodiversity depend on ecosystem type and local species composition. Oikos (2016).