Water quality improvements offset the climatic debt for stream macroinvertebrates over twenty years

Vaughan, Ian P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7263-3822 and Gotelli, Nicholas J. 2019. Water quality improvements offset the climatic debt for stream macroinvertebrates over twenty years. Nature Communications 10 , 1956. 10.1038/s41467-019-09736-3

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Abstract

Many species are accumulating climatic debt as they fail to keep pace with increasing global temperatures. In theory, concomitant decreases in other stressors (e.g. pollution, fragmentation) could offset some warming effects, paying climatic debt with accrued environmental credit. This process may be occurring in many western European rivers. We fit a Markov chain model to ~20,000 macroinvertebrate samples from England and Wales, and demonstrate that despite large temperature increases 1991–2011, macroinvertebrate communities remained close to their predicted equilibrium with environmental conditions. Using a novel analysis of multiple stressors, an accumulated climatic debt of 0.64 (±0.13 standard error) °C of warming was paid by a water-quality credit equivalent to 0.89 (±0.04)°C of cooling. Although there is finite scope for mitigating additional climate warming in this way, water quality improvements appear to have offset recent temperature increases, and the concept of environmental credit may be a useful tool for communicating climate offsetting

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Biosciences
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publisher:	Nature Research
ISSN:	2041-1723
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	29 March 2019
Date of Acceptance:	29 March 2019
Last Modified:	02 May 2023 20:40
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/121267

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