Konza Prairie Long Term Ecological Research

The sustainability of ecosystem services depends on a firm understanding of both how organisms provide these services to humans and how these organisms will be altered with a changing climate. Unquestionably a dominant feature of most ecosystems, invertebrates affect many ecosystem services and are also highly responsive to climate change. However, there is still a basic lack of understanding of the direct and indirect paths by which invertebrates influence ecosystem services, as well as how climate change will affect those ecosystem services by altering invertebrate populations. This indicates a lack of communication and collaboration among scientists researching ecosystem services and climate change effects on invertebrates, and land managers and researchers from other disciplines, which becomes obvious when systematically reviewing the literature relevant to invertebrates, ecosystem services, and climate change. To address this issue, we review how invertebrates respond to climate change. We then review how invertebrates both positively and negatively influence ecosystem services. Lastly, we provide some critical future directions for research needs, and suggest ways in which managers, scientists and other researchers may collaborate to tackle the complex issue of sustaining invertebrate-mediated services under a changing climate.

Decades of place-based, long-term ecological research have generated important insights into patterns and processes among ecosystems. Here, we extend a theoretical framework based on Odum's “strategy of ecosystem development”—which predicted distinct attributes of developing and mature ecosystems—in the context of more recent theoretical advancements that predict how long-term changes in the presses (long-term, gradual changes) and pulses (abrupt changes) of drivers that regulate ecosystem functions (press–pulse regimes) can influence their trajectories of development. Our modifications to ecosystem development theories (a) illustrate how press–pulse regimes can cause ecosystems to continue to develop or oscillate around a stable state (pulsed stability) or cause them to decline if the press–pulse regime changes faster than species and communities can adapt, (b) use examples from long-term ecological research of how attributes interact to affect development, and (c) suggest how revised and new theoretical frameworks can integrate long-term ecological research and observatory networks.