Identifying ‘climate keystone species’ as a tool for conserving ecosystem functioning under climate change

Aim: Climate change affects ecological communities via impacts on species. The community’s response to climate change can be represented as the temporal trend in a climate-related functional property that is quantified using a relevant functional trait. Noteworthy, some species influence this response in the community more strongly than others.
Innovation: Leveraging on the concept of keystone species, we propose that species with a strong effect on the community’s functional response to climate change beyond their relative abundance can be considered as ‘climate keystone species’. We develop a stepwise tool to determine species’ effects on a community’s climate response and identify climate keystone species. We quantify the species-specific effect by measuring the difference in the community’s climate response with and without the species. Next, we identify climate keystone species as those with a strong residual effect after weighting with their relative abundances in the community.
M..., , R software is needed to open and rerun the code and data files.