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Data from: Species-specific responses cushion fish community body size against concurrent global change pressures

Tumolo, Benjamin1; Mehner, Thomas2; Torre Zaffaroni, Paula2; Starck, Sascha2; Wolter, Christian2

Published Jul 31, 2026 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.rxwdbrvs2

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Abstract

Multiple climate warming pressures can simultaneously affect biological communities and catalyze future disturbance. However, understanding how multiple pressures interact to affect ecological structure is challenging. Here, we evaluate the relationship between climate warming pressures (warming, hydrologic anomalies, and eutrophication), and fish community body size before and after a toxic algal bloom causing a large fish kill of a large-river ecosystem using 26 years of ecological data. We find that warming was associated with decreased community-level fish body size, yet changes in temperature and flow did not interact to affect body size. Furthermore, following the timing of an algal bloom, community-level body size increased for a given temperature range, caused by strong size increases of certain species. Thus, we find that at the community-level, deleterious effects of warming were not compounded by concurrent pressures, in part because of species-specific responses. Ultimately, our study provides evidence that warming decreases community-level body size, but such effects are not necessarily amplified by concurrent pressures within natural ecosystems. Data are organized in comma-delimited files containing the sizes of fish captures, taxon-specific relative biomass and community-level geometric mean body size, site-level and environmental covariates regarding temperature and discharge, and Principal Component Site scores.