Co-Extinctions and Co-Compensatory Species Responses to Climate Change Moderate Ecosystem Futures

Consensus has been reached that the sequential loss of biodiversity leads to a non-linear and accelerating decline in ecosystem properties. The form of this relationship, however, is based on theory and empirically derived observations that do not include species co-extinctions. Here, we use data from marine benthic invertebrate communities to parameterise trait-based extinction models that adjust the probability of species extirpation and compensation by including the dependencies between different species across a gradient of climate-driven environmental change. Our simulations reveal that the inclusion of static co-extinctions leads to more pronounced declines in the trajectories of sediment bioturbation—a process of great importance to the functioning of marine ecosystems—than those observed with sequential losses of single species. Compensatory mechanisms and the allowance of the formation of new interactions derived from local and regional species pools moderate the compounding influence of co-extinction but introduce additional variability in community response depending on the composition and functional role of incoming and outgoing species. Our observations emphasise the importance of accounting for local and regional community dynamics, especially in highly connected systems that are prone to extinction cascades when projecting the ecosystem consequences of altered biodiversity.