Impacts of climate change on Lepidoptera species and communities

In this review, the impacts of climate change on Lepidoptera species and communities are summarized, regarding already registered changes in case of individual species and assemblies, and possible future effects. These include changes in abundance, distribution ranges (altitude above sea level, geographical distribution), phenology (earlier or later flying, number of generations per year). The paper also contains a short description of the observed impacts of single factors and conditions (temperature, atmospheric CO2 concentration, drought, predators and parasitoids, UV-B radiation) affecting the life of moths and butterflies, and recorded monitoring results of changes in the Lepidoptera communities of some observed areas. The review is closed with some theoretical considerations concerning the characteristics of “winner” species and also the features and conditions needed for a successful invasion, conquest of new territories.

Climate change and freshwater zooplankton: what does it boil down to?

Recently, major advances in the climate–zooplankton interface have been made some of which appeared to receive much attention in a broader audience of ecologists as well. In contrast to the marine realm, however, we still lack a more holistic summary of recent knowledge in freshwater. We discuss climate change-related variation in physical and biological attributes of lakes and running waters, high-order ecological functions, and subsequent alteration in zooplankton abundance, phenology, distribution, body size, community structure, life history parameters, and behavior by focusing on community level responses. The adequacy of large-scale climatic indices in ecology has received considerable support and provided a framework for the interpretation of community and species level responses in freshwater zooplankton. Modeling perspectives deserve particular consideration, since this promising stream of ecology is of particular applicability in climate change research owing to the inherently predictive nature of this field. In the future, ecologists should expand their research on species beyond daphnids, should address questions as to how different intrinsic and extrinsic drivers interact, should move beyond correlative approaches toward more mechanistic explanations, and last but not least, should facilitate transfer of biological data both across space and time.