Ecology

Biology

Trophic cascade

Computer science

Food web

Computer network

Climate change

Political science

Environmental resource management

Top-down and bottom-up design

Environmental science

Trophic level

Software engineering

Interdependence

Phenology

Resource (disambiguation)

Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Climate change ecology has focused on climate effects on trophic interactions through the lenses of temperature effects on organismal physiology and phenological asynchronies. Trophic interactions are also affected by the nutrient content of resources, but this topic has received less attention. Using concepts from nutritional ecology, we propose a conceptual framework for understanding how climate affects food webs through top-down and bottom-up processes impacted by co-occurring environmental drivers. The framework integrates climate effects on consumer physiology and feeding behavior with effects on resource nutrient content. It illustrates how studying responses of simplified food webs to simplified climate change might produce erroneous predictions. We encourage greater integrative complexity of climate change research on trophic interactions to resolve patterns and enhance predictive capacities.

Climate Change, Nutrition, and Bottom-Up and Top-Down Food Web Processes