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Growth responses of a green alga to multiple environmental drivers

Nature Climate Change volume 5, pages 892–897 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

One feature of global change is that biota must respond not to single, but to multiple environmental drivers. By growing a model photosynthetic microbe in environments containing between one and eight different drivers, including changes in CO2, temperature, and pH, in different combinations, we show that the number as well as the identities of drivers explain shifts in population growth rates. This is because the biotic response to multiple environmental drivers depends on the response to the single dominant driver, and the chance of a driver of large effect being present increases with the number of drivers. Interactions between drivers slightly counteract the expected drop in growth. Our results demonstrate that population growth declines in a predictable way with the number of environmental drivers, and provide an empirically supported model for scaling up from studies on organismal responses to single drivers to predict responses to large numbers of environmental drivers.

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Figure 1: Cartoon of the effects of multiple drivers on organismal function using an environmental tolerance curve.
Figure 2: Population growth rate of C. reinhardtii under zero to eight environmental drivers.
Figure 3: Population growth rates of C. reinhardtii in test environments containing high CO2, low pH, and high temperature.

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Acknowledgements

We thank N. Colegrave for discussion on experimental design and statistics, J. Hadfield for discussion on statistics, H. Kuehne for technical assistance, and M. Waterfall for assistance with flow cytometry. This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) (FP7 grant number 260266) and a Royal Society (UK) University Research Fellowship to S.C.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Ashworth Laboratories, The King’s Buildings, West Mains Road Edinburgh EH9 3FL, UK,

    Georgina Brennan & Sinéad Collins

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  1. Georgina Brennan
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G.B. and S.C. designed the experiment, G.B. performed experiments and S.C. supervised laboratory work. Both authors contributed to statistical analysis and writing the article.

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Correspondence to Sinéad Collins.

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Brennan, G., Collins, S. Growth responses of a green alga to multiple environmental drivers. Nature Clim Change 5, 892–897 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2682

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