Invasive species and global climate change.

Chapter 7 (Page no: 119)

Interactions between climate change and species invasions in the marine realm.

Climate change and species invasions are prominent drivers of anthropogenic global change, contributing to biodiversity loss in marine systems worldwide. It is increasingly understood that these two processes might interact, with their combined impacts being more or less than the sum of their individual effects. Over the past two decades, approaches to testing this hypothesis have shifted from time-series observations of concomitant increases in both processes to experimental tests that are beginning to reveal the mechanisms underlying interactions between these two aspects of global change. Results of many studies conform to expectations that under climate change, invasive species abundances, ranges and per capita effects - collectively indicative of invader impacts - will increase. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that not all interactions are synergistic: there are many documented cases of combined impacts of climate change and invasions being less than additive. There remain significant gaps in our understanding of responses to non-thermal factors (such as changes in ocean pH, dissolved oxygen and extreme events) and how species-specific idiosyncrasies will manifest in changes at the community level. Continued exploration of the interactions between climate change and species invasions will help us to incorporate another level of complexity: potential indirect effects mediated through responses of interacting invasive and native species.

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