The provisioning of sustaining goods and services that we obtain from natural ecosystems is a strong economic justification for the conservation of biological diversity. Understanding the relationship between these goods and services and changes in the size, arrangement, and quality of natural habitats is a fundamental challenge of natural resource management. In this paper, we describe a new approach to assessing the implications of habitat loss for loss of ecosystem services by examining how the provision of different ecosystem services is dominated by species from different trophic levels. We then develop a mathematical model that illustrates how declines in habitat quality and quantity lead to sequential losses of trophic diversity. The model suggests that declines in the provisioning of services will initially be slow but will then accelerate as species from higher trophic levels are lost at faster rates. Comparison of these patterns with empirical examples of ecosystem collapse (and assembly) suggest similar patterns occur in natural systems impacted by anthropogenic change. In general, ecosystem goods and services provided by species in the upper trophic levels will be lost before those provided by species lower in the food chain. The decrease in terrestrial food chain length predicted by the model parallels that observed in the oceans following overexploitation. The large area requirements of higher trophic levels make them as susceptible to extinction as they are in marine systems where they are systematically exploited. Whereas the traditional species–area curve suggests that 50% of species are driven extinct by an order‐of‐magnitude decline in habitat abundance, this magnitude of loss may represent the loss of an entire trophic level and all the ecosystem services performed by the species on this trophic level.

In many regions across the globe, extreme weather events such as storms have increased in frequency, intensity, and duration due to climate change. Ecological theory predicts that such extreme events should have large impacts on ecosystem structure and function. High winds and precipitation associated with storms can affect lakes via short‐term runoff events from watersheds and physical mixing of the water column. In addition, lakes connected to rivers and streams will also experience flushing due to high flow rates. Although we have a well‐developed understanding of how wind and precipitation events can alter lake physical processes and some aspects of biogeochemical cycling, our mechanistic understanding of the emergent responses of phytoplankton communities is poor. Here we provide a comprehensive synthesis that identifies how storms interact with lake and watershed attributes and their antecedent conditions to generate changes in lake physical and chemical environments. Such changes can restructure phytoplankton communities and their dynamics, as well as result in altered ecological function (e.g., carbon, nutrient and energy cycling) in the short‐ and long‐term. We summarize the current understanding of storm‐induced phytoplankton dynamics, identify knowledge gaps with a systematic review of the literature, and suggest future research directions across a gradient of lake types and environmental conditions.

Population dynamics are influenced by drivers acting from outside and from within an ecosystem. Extrinsic forces operating over broad spatial scales can impart synchronous behavior to separate populations, while internal, system-specific drivers often lead to idiosyncratic behavior. Here, we demonstrate synchrony in community-level dynamics among phytoplankton and bacteria in six north temperate humic lakes. The influence of regional meteorological factors explained much of the temporal variability in the phytoplankton community, and resulted in synchronous patterns of community change among lakes. Bacterial dynamics, in contrast, were driven by system-specific interactions with phytoplankton. Despite the importance of intrinsic factors for determining bacterial community composition and dynamics, we demonstrated that biological interactions transmitted the signal of the regional extrinsic drivers to the bacterial communities, ultimately resulting in synchronous community phenologies for bacterioplankton communities as well. This demonstrates how linkages between the components of a complex biological system can work to simplify the dynamics of the system and implies that it may be possible to predict the behavior of microbial communities responsible for important biogeochemical services in the landscape.