Invertebrate Impacts on Ecosystem Services under Climate Change: A Synthesis Using Insights from the LTER Network Proposers: Angela Laws: (alaws@ksu.edu ; (785)532-7053) Division of Biology, Kansas State University. Chelse Prather: (cprather@nd.edu ; (574) 631-0949) Department of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame. Shannon Pelini: (spelini@fas.harvard.edu ; (978)756-6165) Harvard Forest, Harvard University. LTER PI sponsor: Anthony Joern (ajoern@ksu.edu ; (785)532-7073) Division of Biology, Kansas State University. Participants: Participants of the proposed workshop include 5 graduate students, 5 post-docs, and 1 faculty member from 8 LTER sites, including terrestrial and aquatic (freshwater and marine) ecologists: Chris Bloch, Chuan-Kai Ho, John Kominoski, Angela Laws, Scott Newbold, Sheena Parsons, Shannon Pelini, Chelse Prather, Emily Rivest, Israel Del Toro, and Megan Woltz. Summary We request funds to conduct a meeting at Harvard Forest in April, 2010. The meeting will provide the opportunity for further discussion, synthesis of ideas and LTER data, and the preparation of two manuscripts that follow from our 2009 ASM working group “Invertebrate impacts to ecosystem services under climate change”. Funds will support travel, food, and lodging for participants during the 3-day meeting. Goals The proposed meeting will be used to evaluate and synthesize the potential roles of invertebrates in providing ecosystem services and to predict how these roles might be affected by climate change using examples from LTER studies whenever possible. Our goal is to produce two manuscripts based on these topics for publication in peer- reviewed journals, such as Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment or Conservation Biology. The first manuscript will be a thorough review of invertebrate mediated ecosystem services and will include (1) a discussion of important mechanisms that determine invertebrate impacts on those services and (2) hypotheses about ecosystem traits that may make particular systems disproportionately affected by invertebrates. The second manuscript will address the effects of global climate change on invertebrate mediated ecosystem services, including predictions about which invertebrate taxa may be especially sensitive to global climate change, thus having strong future impacts on ecosystem services. Background As the most globally abundant and diverse animal group, invertebrates are important components of most ecosystems, filling a variety of niches. As such, invertebrates should play crucial roles in structuring ecosystem services in many systems. However, the role of invertebrates in providing ecosystem services is often ignored, and comprehensive reviews are surprisingly lacking. In fact, the only reviews of invertebrate effects on ecosystem services that we are aware of focus on a narrow set of ecological systems (i.e. soil, freshwater, ground water, and agricultural systems) 1-4 . Given that invertebrates are particularly sensitive to abiotic conditions 5 , global climate change is projected to have many direct and indirect impacts on invertebrate population dynamics including changes to population size, phenology, feeding rates, and species’ distributions 6 . In turn, these alterations to invertebrate consumer communities will undoubtedly have cascading effects on the many ecosystem services that invertebrates provide. However, changes to ecosystem services mediated through climate-driven alterations of invertebrate populations have not received the attention that they merit. These issues raise several questions about the role of invertebrate consumers in structuring ecosystem services across a wide range of ecosystems, many of which the LTER network is ideally suited to address. (1) What ecosystem services are strongly impacted by invertebrates? (2) What mechanisms are most important for determining invertebrate provisioning of ecosystem services? (3) In which ecosystems might invertebrates provide a disproportionately large part of the ecosystem services, and are there particular traits that can be generalized about those systems? (4) How will climate change impact invertebrate provisioning of ecosystem services and what are the most important mechanisms driving those impacts? (5) Are there particular invertebrate traits or functional groups that are more susceptible to climate change, so that services performed by those invertebrates will be disproportionately affected by climate change?