Data from: Quantifying coextinctions and ecosystem service vulnerability in coastal ecosystems experiencing climate warming

Climate change is negatively impacting ecosystems and their contributions
to human well-being, known as ecosystem services. Previous research has
mainly focused on the direct effects of climate change on species and
ecosystem services, leaving a gap in understanding the indirect impacts
resulting from changes in species interactions within complex ecosystems.
This knowledge gap is significant because the loss of a species in a food
web can lead to additional species losses or "co-extinctions,"
particularly when the species most impacted by climate change are also the
species that play critical roles in food web persistence or provide
ecosystem services. Here, we present a framework to investigate the
relationships among species vulnerability to climate change, their roles
within the food web, their contributions to ecosystem services, and the
overall persistence of these systems and services in the face of
climate-induced species losses. To do this, we assess the robustness of
food webs and their associated ecosystem services to climate-driven
species extinctions in eight empirical rocky intertidal food webs. Across
food webs, we find that highly connected species are not the most
vulnerable to climate change. However, we find species that directly
provide ecosystem services are more vulnerable to climate change and more
connected than species that do not directly provide services, which
results in ecosystem service provision collapsing before food webs.
Overall, we find that food webs are more robust to climate change than the
ecosystem services they provide and show that combining species roles in
food webs and services with their vulnerability to climate change offer
predictions about the impacts of coextinctions for future food web and
ecosystem service persistence. However, these conclusions are limited by
data availability and quality, underscoring the need for more
comprehensive data collection on linking species roles in interaction
networks and their vulnerabilities to climate change.