Oral Presentation Society for Freshwater Science 2026 Annual Meeting

Towards understanding the combined effects of warming and drought on stream food web stability (135592)

Nate M Heili 1 , James R Junker 2 , Jonathan P Benstead 3 , Arial Shogren 3 , Alexander D Huryn 3 , Mark Ledger 4 , Kieran Khamis 4 , Wyatt F Cross 1
  1. Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana, USA
  2. University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA
  3. The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
  4. University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

Environmental warming modifies consumer-resource interactions and, in turn, alters food web structure, energy flow, and ecosystem stability. Despite the widespread expectation that warming destabilizes ecological networks, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence that warmed food webs are less able to resist or recover from additional, acute disturbances such as drought. Here, we combine empirical food web data from geothermal streams in Iceland spanning a wide thermal gradient (~5 to 27°C) with bioenergetic models to quantify energy fluxes and evaluate how assemblage structure and pathways of energy flow influence food web stability. Building on previous work showing that warming increases total energy demand and shifts energy flux toward small-bodied, fast-turnover taxa, we apply Jacobian matrices of interaction strengths at seasonal and annual time scales to assess stability across temperature regimes. We further simulate drought across the thermal gradient through trait-based, non-random species removals to test whether long-term warming amplifies or compensates for the destabilizing effects of flow reduction. As global change intensifies stressors on streams and rivers, this approach links temperature-driven changes in community composition and energy flux to predictions of food web stability under increasing hydrologic disturbance, offering a roadmap for future empirical studies.