Introduction

Biological Consequences of Global Change (BCGC) was a core international scientific program supported by International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) and International Society of Zoological Sciences (ISZS). During the past decade, BCGC has made significant progresses in understanding the effects of global change on species extinction, biological invasion, pest outbreaks and disease transmissions. In this symposium, we invited several scientists to present their recent results on this topic. Dr. Zhibin Zhang will talk about the needs for integrating small- and large-scale studies in revealing climatic impacts on population dynamics of animals and diseases under accelerated global change. Dr. Leif Christian Stige and his colleagues will give an overview of how marine ecosystems respond to pressures caused by humans, using the example of the fish cod in the arctic region. Dr. Lei Xu will present findings on the influence of environmental factors on global transmission of plague of the Third Pandemic. Dr. Guoliang Li will present their findings on the effects of climate change on gut microbiota of a small rodent species in the Inner Mongolia plateau. Dr. Yury Yu Dgebuadze will give a presentation on the consequences of global changes and invasions for the food nets of aquatic ecosystems in Arctic regions. Dr. Xinru Wan will present an overview on the climate change and extinction of large mammals in Eurasia from late Pleistocene to Holocene. After presentations, we will discuss the future directions of BCGC, to carry on the core program.

Speakers and title:

1. Opening remarks (each 5 minutes)

Prof. Zhibin Zhang, Program leader of BCGC, President of ISZS

Prof. Hiroyuki Takeda, President of IUBS

Dr. Nathalie Fomproix, Executive Director of IUBS

Prof. John Buckeridge, Past President of IUBS and ISZS

Prof. Nils Christian Stenseth, Past President of IUBS

2. Zhibin Zhang (Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China):

Integrating small- and large-scale studies for revealing climatic impacts on population dynamics of animals under the accelerated global change

3. Leif Christian Stige, Joël Durant , Øystein Langangen (Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Norway):

Effects of climate change, fishing and oil on marine ecosystems.

4. Lei Xu (Department of Earth System Science / Institute for Global Change Studies Tsinghua University, China):

Historical and genomic data reveal the influencing factors on global transmission velocity of plague during the Third Pandemic

Coffee break (10 minutes)

5. Yury Yu Dgebuadze (A.N. Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia):

Consequences of global changes and invasions for food nets of aquatic ecosystems

6. Guoliang Li (Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China):

Meta-omics analysis brings insights into bottom-up effects of climate change on a small rodent species

7. Xinru Wan (Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China):

Climate change and extinction of large mammals in Eurasia from late Pleistocene to Holocene

Abstracts and information of the speakers

"Integrating small- and large-scale studies for revealing climatic impacts on population dynamics of animals under the accelerated global change"

Zhibin Zhang ^1*, Chuan Yan¹, Xinru Wan¹, Lei Xu², Marcel Holyoak³, Yvon Le Maho⁴, Rodolfo Dirzo⁵, Charles J. Krebs⁶, Nils Chr. Stenseth⁷

¹State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management of Pest Insects and Rodents, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

²Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

³Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, California, USA.

⁴Université de Strasbourg, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien (IPHC), Strasbourg, France.

⁵Department of Biological Sciences, 385 Serra Mall,Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

⁶Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada and Department of Biological Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

⁷ Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, N-0316 Oslo, Norway

Present’s Email: zhangzb@ioz.ac.cn

Abstract:

Climate is thought to be a major extrinsic factor of population dynamics of animals, as defined by the climate hypothesis in population ecology. Although Elton (1924) proposed that large-scale climate drives large-scale synchronous of population cycles of small mammals, precise mechanism for this have been more elusive. Subsequently, investigators went to document extensive effects of small-scale climate factors such as temperature, rainfall, and snow on population dynamics. Then, during the last two decades, huge meteorological and social impacts of large-scale climate factors such as El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and Northern Hemispheric Temperature (NHT) have begun to be realized which stimulated studies of the effects of these factors on biological populations. Extensive reviews of the literature have documented correlations between large-scale climate factors and population dynamics in various species and regions. Expanding studies of climatic hypothesis from the small- to large-scale represents one of the most important advances in population ecology. However, the underlying mechanism of large-scale climate on population dynamics is still not fully understood. We appeal for more integrative studies at large- and small-scales to reveal the diverse effects of climate on natural populations and to deal with challenges of accelerated climate change. Future studies should be directed to aspects including multivariate packages of weather, nonmonotonic effects, interaction chain effects, buffering effects, synchronization of cycles, and early warning signals for wildlife management.

Personal information: Zhibin Zhang is a Professor from the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He obtained the B.S. degree of Zoology in the Lanzhou University in 1984, and the Ph.D degree of Animal Ecology, CAS in 1989. He was elected as the foreign member of Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2014, and foreign member of Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea) in 2017. He is now the President of International Society of Zoological Sciences (ISZS), and Editor-in-Chief of Integrative Zoology. His research interests focus on studying impacts of global change on population and community dynamics of animals and their interactions with plants and microbes by integrating the ecological studies from local to global scale, and from monotonic to non-monotonic regimes

"Effects of climate change, fishing and oil on marine ecosystems"

Leif Christian Stige, Øystein Langangen, Joël M. Durant

Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.

Presenters’ E-mail: l.c.stige@ibv.uio.no, oysteol@ibv.uio.no, j.m.durant@ibv.uio.no

Abstract:

Marine ecosystems are impacted by multiple pressures including climate change, fishing and pollution. We here give an overview of some recent research on how marine ecosystems respond to these pressures, with a main focus on the Northeast Atlantic. Using the commercially and ecologically important fish cod (Gadus morhua) as example, we show how climate warming leads to a poleward displacement in distribution, with population increases in northern areas and declines in southern areas. The mechanisms for the effects of warming include both direct effects of temperature and indirect effects, e.g. through food availability. We further present research on the combined effects of climate, fishing and oil spills. Over the history of fishing several examples of population collapse have animated the debate around the respective role of fishing and climate of these demises. Using examples from cod and other iconic species in the Barents Sea, we show how fishing may lead to an age-truncated population structure and how such a change can modify the population response to climate change. We show that the population growth of age truncated populations is more sensitive to environmental variability early in life. Looking at several populations with available time series, we show that it is a general pattern that fishing leads to higher sensitivity to climate, making difficult to sort out the respectively role of fishing and climate in population demise. Accidental oil-spills are known to affect fish at the individual level and may potentially have significant effects also at the population level. How effects at the individual level are alleviated and/or accentuated at the cohort and population levels depend on different mechanisms, including density dependence, demographic structure of the population and spatial distribution. Both fishing and climate may affect how density dependence act, the structure of the population and the spatial distribution. Here, we will give examples of how accidental oil-spills may affect the population dynamics of cod in the Barents Sea and how fishing and climate may alter the expected impact.

Personal information

Dr. Leif Chr. Stige is senior research scientist at the University of Oslo. His main research interest is population and ecosystem dynamics, with particular focus on fluctuations of zooplankton and fish in the Barents Sea.

Dr. Øystein Langangen is a researcher at the University of Oslo. His research interest is population and ecosystem dynamics with a focus on the Barents Sea ecosystem. In particular, he is interested in how perturbations in fish early life may propagate in the system.

Dr. Joël Durant is a senior researcher at the University of Oslo. His main research interest is population dynamics, with particular focus the role of phenology on trophic interactions in many marine systems.

"Revealing the global transmission patterns and the influencing factors of plague during the Third Pandemic"

Lei Xu^a,b,c,d,#, Leif C. Stige^b, Herwig Leirs^e, Simon Neerinckx^e, Kenneth L. Gagef, Ruifu Yang^g, Qiyong Liu^c, Barbara Bramanti^b, Katharine R. Dean^b, Hui Tang^h, Zhe Sun^b,d, Nils Chr. Stenseth^b,d,1, and Zhibin Zhang^a,1

^aState Key Laboratory of Integrated Management on Pest Insects and Rodents, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100101 Beijing, China; ^bCentre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, N-0316 Oslo, Norway; ^cState Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 102206 Beijing, China; ^dMinistry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, 100084 Beijing, China; ^eEvolutionary Ecology Group, Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, 2020 Antwerp, Belgium; ^fBacterial Diseases Branch, Division of Vector-Borne Disease, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Fort Collins, CO 80523; ^gState Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, 100071 Beijing, China; and ^hDepartment of Geosciences, University of Oslo, N-0316 Oslo, Norway. # xu_lei@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn

Abstract:

Plague is a potentially explosive infectious disease that has caused three pandemics during the last millennia. Nowadays, plague causes sporadic cases every year and even some outbreaks, like in Madagascar in late 2017. We combined historical records of more than 200 years with available genomic data to reconstruct the worldwide spreading pattern of plague during the third pandemic, and analyzed the association of spatiotemporal environmental factors with spreading velocity. We found that one lineage, 2.MED, spread significantly faster than others, and that plague spread slower in densely compared to sparsely populated places.Temperature exhibited region-dependent association with spread speed, while precipitation showed positive effects globally. In contrast to later cases, early plague spread was characterized by long-distance transfers in short-time. Our results provide novel insights into the global transmission patterns and suggest strategies for preventing plague transmission under accelerated climate change and globalization.

Personal information:

Dr. Lei Xu obtained his PhD in ecology in the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is now an associate Professor of The Tingshua University. His interests are impacts of climate change on infectious diseases.

"Meta-omics analysis brings insights into bottom-up effects of climate change on a small rodent species"

Guoliang Li¹, Baofa Yin², Jing Li³, Jun Wang³, Wanhong Wei², Xinrong Wan¹, Baoli Zhu³, Zhibin Zhang^1*

¹State Key Laboratory of Integrated Pest Management, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; ²Colleges of Bioscience and Biotechnology, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou 225009, China; ³Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Present’s Email: zhangzb@ioz.ac.cn

Abstract:

There is a growing recognition of the involvement of climate change in population dynamics of rodents. Changing precipitation regimes, as one aspect of climate change, are likely to exert bottom-up control of herbivorous rodent by altering vegetation composition, influencing rodents’ diet. Yet, the underlying mechanism for bottom-up effect of precipitation on rodent is poorly understood. Here, a precipitation manipulation experiment in the field and three feeding trials with controlled diets in the laboratory were conducted to evaluate the effect of varied diets, induced by altered precipitation regimes, on body growth of Brandt’s vole (Lasiopodomys brandtii), the composition and function of its gut microbiota as well as metabolites by integrated meta-omics.

Precipitation supplementation facilitated the recovery of Leymus chinensis population in the enclosure, which led to an increase in total consumption of L. chinensis but a decrease in Stipa krylovii by Brandt’s voles. This dietary shift was accompanied with changes in gut microbiota and boosted voles’ body growth. In the laboratory, compared with voles fed with control diet, voles fed with precipitation groups diet exhibit different gut microbial composition and functions, higher SCFAs concentration and faster body growth. Nutritionally speaking, the contents of fructose and fructooligosaccharide in L. chinensis were largely higher than that in Stipa krylovii. In the nutrient manipulation experiments, diets supplemented with 5% or 10% fructose increased the body growth of voles by the modulation of gut microbiota and function pathways as well as production of SCFAs, especially acetate, propionate and butyrate. The same pattern was also found in voles fed with diets supplemented with a low dose of fructooligosaccharide (5% instead of 10% addition). We still found that the relative abundance of Eubacterium hallii (SCFAs-producing bacteria) was consistently increased after feeding voles with more L. chinensis, fructose or fructooligosaccharide. These results provide novel insights into mechanisms by which bottom-up precipitation pulses cascade through plant community to affect rodent populations. Our results highlight the importance and complexity of gut microbiota composition and function in small rodents’ response to changing climate changes.

Personal information

Dr. Guoliang Li is now an ssistant Professor of Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests are population dynamics; climate change, nutritional ecology, gut microbiology of small rodents

"Climate change and extinction of large mammals in Eurasia from late Pleistocene to Holocene"

Xinru Wan^a,b, Zhibin Zhang^a,b

^a State Key Laboratory of Integrated Management on Pest Insects and Rodents in Agriculture, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.

^b University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yuquan Road, Beijing 100049, China.

Present’s Email: wanxinru@ioz.ac.cn

Abstract:

The massive extinction of megafauna from late Pleistocene to Holocene has long been a puzzle to scientists and the public. Climate change and humans or combination of both have been proposed to explain the extinction of megafauna species, but their distinctive effects have not been qualified. By using records of animal fossils and anthropological remains, we quantitatively assess the impacts of temperature and humans on extinctions of three megafauna mammal groups (i.e. mammoth, rhinoceros, and horse) from late Pleistocene to Holocene. We found the total extinction of mammoths and rhinos in frigid zones were mostly driven by climate warming from the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene; the extinction or major extirpations of rhinos and horses were mostly driven by human activities. Our results provided new insight into the extinction of megafauna from late Pleistocene to Holocene by disentangling the roles of climate change and human impacts on local, regional and total extinction processes of large mammals.

Personal information

Dr. Xinru Wan obtained his Ph.D of Ecology in the Institute of Zoology (IOZ), Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is now a postdoctoral fellow of the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests include: biological consequences of global change on pest outbreaks and population decline or species extinction of animals.

General Programme