Meeting Abstract

11.5  Tuesday, Jan. 4  Environmental change and declining resource availability for small mammal communities in the Great Basin ROWE, R.J.*; TERRY, R.C.; RICKART, E.A.; University of Utah; Stanford University; University of Utah rrowe@umnh.utah.edu

Impacts of environmental change on biodiversity emphasize species’ traits, including phenologies, geographic distributions and abundances. Responses of higher-level aggregate community or ecosystem properties have not been considered as they are assumed to be relatively stable due to compensatory dynamics and diversity-stability relationships. However, this assumption may not be as fundamental as previously thought. Here, we assess stability in the aggregate properties of total abundance, biomass and energy consumption for small mammal communities in the Great Basin using paired historic and recent survey data spanning nearly a century of environmental change. Results show marked declines in each property independent of spatial scale, elevation or habitat type, and a re-allocation of available biomass and energy favoring generalist species. Because aggregate properties directly reflect resource availability, our findings indicate a region-wide decline in resources of ca.50% over the past century, and illustrate the power of using aggregate properties as indicators of ecological conditions and environmental change.