Publication Title

Global Change Biology

Document Type

Article

Department or Program

Biology

Publication Date

11-15-2017

Keywords

age effects, air temperature, climate change, global mean temperature, long-term dataset, longitudinal study, sea surface temperature, seabirds, storm-petrels

Abstract

The salient feature of anthropogenic climate change over the last century has been the rise in global mean temperature. However, global mean temperature is not used as an explanatory variable in studies of population-level response to climate change, perhaps because the signal-to-noise ratio of this gross measure makes its effect difficult to detect in any but the longest of datasets. Using a population of Leach's storm-petrels breeding in the Bay of Fundy, we tested whether local, regional, or global temperature measures are the best index of reproductive success in the face of climate change in species that travel widely between and within seasons. With a 56-year dataset, we found that annual global mean temperature (AGMT) was the single most important predictor of hatching success, more so than regional sea surface temperatures (breeding season or winter) and local air temperatures at the nesting colony. Storm-petrel reproductive success showed a quadratic response to rising temperatures, in that hatching success increased up to some critical temperature, and then declined when AGMT exceeded that temperature. The year at which AGMT began to consistently exceed that critical temperature was 1988. Importantly, in this population of known-age individuals, the impact of changing climate was greatest on inexperienced breeders: reproductive success of inexperienced birds increased more rapidly as temperatures rose and declined more rapidly after the tipping point than did reproductive success of experienced individuals. The generality of our finding that AGMT is the best predictor of reproductive success in this system may hinge on two things. First, an integrative global measure may be best for species in which individuals move across an enormous spatial range, especially within seasons. Second, the length of our dataset and our capacity to account for individual- and age-based variation in reproductive success increase our ability to detect a noisy signal.

Comments

Original version is available from the publisher at: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13982

PubMed ID

29140586

Copyright Note

This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Bates College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.

Required Publisher's Statement

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Annual Global Mean Temperature explains reproductive success in a marine vertebrate from 1955-2010. Global Change Biology 24:1599-1613, which has been published in final form at: https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13982. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited.

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