Food Webs 13 (2017) 51–52
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Food Webs
journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/food-webs
Beyond global warming: Putting the “climate” back into “climate
change ecology”☆
Brandon T. Barton
Department of Biological Sciences, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, United States
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 22 March 2017
Received in revised form 22 March 2017
Accepted 22 March 2017
Available online 23 March 2017
Contents
Appendix A. Supplementary data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ecologists have a long-standing interest in understanding how
Earth's biota is affected by its abiota. Even before Ecology was a
named discipline, biologists such as Charles Darwin (1859) recognized
that multiple abiotic factors were important for community dynamics
and natural selection. In the early 20th century, forest ecologists explic-
itly incorporated the combined effects of temperature, precipitation,
wind, light and moisture into their understanding of forest dynamics
(Fricke, 1904; Pearson, 1920). Hutchinson (1944) identified tempera-
ture, light, and nutrients as important factors structuring phytoplankton
communities, and Park (1954) famously demonstrated that tempera-
ture and humidity affected the outcome of intraspecific competition be-
tween flour beetles. Given this precedent, investigating multiple
components of climate change should be a natural progression and pri-
mary research area in ecology. However, this does not seem to be the
case.
Climate change is driven by elevated concentrations of greenhouse
gases, in particular carbon dioxide. Thus, initial research on the impacts
of climate change on ecological systems focused on the effects of CO2
enrichment. Explicit investigation into the consequences of climate
☆ Editorial for SI: Diverse effects of climate change on ecological communities.
E-mail address: barton@biology.msstate.edu.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fooweb.2017.03.002
2352-2496/© 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
52
52
change for ecological communities accelerated in the mid-1990′s.
Given that “climate change” was colloquially referred to as “global
warming” at the time, it is not surprising that initial ecological studies
emphasized the effects of temperature. However, the phrase is mislead-
ing, as some areas are cooling or not changing at all. Additionally, “global
warming” fails to acknowledge the litany of other factors that are
changing due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.
Interestingly, the public may be embracing the more precise ver-
biage faster than the scientific community. The number of online
searches for the phrase “global warming” decreased relative to online
searches for the phrase “climate change” between 2004 and 2016
(Fig. 1; linear regression, slope = −0.22, p b 0.001; Data source: Google
Trends, www.google.com/trends). Over the same time period, scientists
did the opposite and used “global warming” at an increasing rate (Fig. 1;
increasing ratio of published articles using “global warming” relative to
“climate change” each year between 2004 and 2016; linear regression,
slope = 0.094, p = 0.020; source: Scopus). Thus, while the general pub-
lic has increasingly emphasized the multi-factor nature of climate
change (at least in terms of internet queries), the scientific community
has done the opposite and increasingly focused on a single factor,
warming.
To illustrate this point, I searched the Scopus database for experi-
mental studies on the effects of climate change on food webs (see
52 B.T. Barton / Food Webs 13 (2017) 51–52

4.5 The presence of this bias in the literature motivated the special issue,
Diverse effects of climate change on ecological communities. These papers
global warming : climate change

4
review some of the most understudied aspects of climate change
3.5 (Fig. 2), including ocean acidification (Ghedini and Connell 2017), phe-
nology of sea ice (Post, 2017), changes in soil salinity (Harmon and
3 Daigh, 2017), altered patterns of snow (Penczykowski et al., 2017)
2.5 and reduced wind speeds, which are otherwise known as “global
stilling” (Cherry and Barton, 2017). Additionally, Rosenblatt et al.
2 (2017) model the effects of multiple changing variables (temperature,
CO2, and water availability) on tri-trophic interactions. These articles
1.5 not only synthesize the current literature, but also identify knowledge
1 Internet searches gaps and important future research directions with the attempt to fur-
ther our understanding of the broad effects of climate change on com-
0.5 Published articles munities. Although each review generally focuses on a single abiotic
factor, a common theme that emerges throughout the special issue is
0
that these factors are not independent. Thus, while it is important that
2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017
research moves beyond “global warming” and investigates the effects
Fig. 1. Ratio of the terms “global warming” and “climate change” used in internet searches of diverse abiotic factors, it is equally important that future work inte-
and scientific literature. Between 2003 and 2016, internet search queries for the phrase grates the combined effects of multiple factors. After all, the objective
“global warming” decreased relative to the phrase “climate change” (filled circles; of climate change research is not to understand the effects of individual
Source: Google Trends). In contrast, the number of published articles using the phrase components of climate, but instead understand the net effect of a chang-
“global warming” increased relative to the number of articles using “climate change”
ing climate.
(open circles; Source: Scopus).

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Fig. 2 for search details). This search yielded 234 papers. I reviewed each
paper and recorded which climate variables were studied (Appendix I).
As predicted, temperature was by far the most studied climate variable
and was investigated in 69% of papers. The next most frequently studied
climate variables were CO2 (16.2%; including pH and acidification stud-
ies), rain (15.8%; including drought and moisture studies), and nutrients
(12.7%; including atmospheric deposition and eutrophication). Al-
though I constrained my review to experimental studies, the pattern
likely holds true for the broader literature: ecologists have studied the
effects of temperature far more than other abiotic variables, and we
know relatively little about how changes in those other variables will af-
fect communities.
Temperature (69%)
Wind (1%) CO2/pH (16%)
Hypoxia (3%)
CLIMATE
CHANGE
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at http://dx.
doi.org/10.1016/j.fooweb.2017.03.002.
References
Cherry, M.J., Barton, B.T., 2017. Effects of wind on predator-prey interactions. Food Webs.
Darwin, C., 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preserva-
tion of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. John Murray, London.
Fricke, B., 1904. “Licht-und Schattenholzarten”, ein wissenschaftlich nicht begründetes
Dogma.
Harmon, J.P., Daigh, A.L.M., 2017. Attempting to predict the plant-mediated trophic effects
of soil salinity: a mechanistic approach to supplementing insufficient information.
Food Webs.
Hutchinson, G.E., 1944. Limnological studies in Connecticut. VII. A critical examination of
the supposed relationship between phytoplakton periodicity and chemical changes
in lake waters. Ecology 25, 3–26.
Park, T., 1954. Experimental studies of interspecies competition II. Temperature, humidi-
ty, and competition in two species of Tribolium. Physiol. Zool. 27, 177–238.
Pearson, G.A., 1920. Factors controlling the distribution of forest types, part I. Ecology 1,
139–159.
Penczykowski, R.M., Connolly, B.M., Barton, B.T., 2017. Winter is changing: trophic inter-
actions under altered snow regimes. Food Webs.
Post, E., 2017. Implications of earlier sea ice melt for phenological cascades in arctic ma-
rine food webs. Food Webs.
Rosenblatt, A.E., Smith-Ramesh, L.M., Schmitz, O.J., 2017. Interactive effects of multiple cli-
mate change variables on food web dynamics: modeling the effects of changing tem-
perature, CO2, and water availability on a tri-trophic food web. Food Webs.

Salinity (6%)
Rain/drought
(16%)

Snow/Ice (6%)
Light (9%) Nutrients (13%)

Fig. 2. Summary of factors examined in literature on climate change effects on food webs. I
searched the Scopus database for all published articles containing the phrases “climate
change” and “experiment” and either “predator”, “prey”, or “food web” in their title,
abstract, or key words. This search produced 299 publications. Removing search results
that were not experimental climate change studies (e.g., reviews, theoretical papers, or
did not investigate a climate change variable) yielded 234 publications. The climate vari-
ables investigated in each paper are summarized in the figure, with arrow width propor-
tional to the percent of publications focused on each variable. Citations and summaries of
the variables studied can be found in Appendix I.