New publication from Iceland project

It's been a bit quiet on the publication front of late (we had a very sobering run of rejections last year), but Dan Nelson's first manuscript from his dissertation is now out in Global Change Biology. In it, we describe how the experimental warming of a small upland stream in Iceland by 3.8 degrees C changed the structure of its invertebrate community. Somewhat surprisingly, average body size increased. The landscape in which the stream is embedded has streams of varying temperature, which contain taxa with a wide range in thermal preference. It just happens that many of the invertebrates with higher thermal preference are relatively large-bodied (snails and black flies, for example) and these groups responded strongly to our whole-stream warming manipulation. These results show that shifts towards lower average body size with warming are not universal, and that the combination of diversity in thermal preference and dispersal ability will dictate how communities reassemble as ecosystems warm in the future. Well done to Dan for all the hard work he put in to reveal these patterns!

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