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Warming and resource enhancement shape food webs in South China Sea coral reef system

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Abstract

Coral reef ecosystems are being altered by rising ocean temperatures and increasing nutrient inputs, yet their combined influence on food-web structure is not well understood. Here we analyzed 130 coral reef food webs across the South China Sea, constructed from environmental DNA surveys integrated with trophic interactions. We grouped the food webs into surface-water, bottom-water and sediment habitats. Our analyses reveal pronounced structural differences among habitats: surface- and bottom-water webs exhibit significantly higher connectance and nestedness, whereas sediment webs are more compartmentalized. Using linear mixed-effects models, we find that temperature and productivity interact in nonlinear ways to shape food-web properties. In surface waters, higher temperature together with higher productivity tends to increase connectance, whereas in deeper waters the same conditions tend to lengthen trophic pathways and reduce stability. These results suggest that future environmental change may influence pelagic and benthic reef food webs in contrasting ways.

Data availability

The raw sequence data reported in this paper have been deposited in the China National Center for Bioinformation / Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (GSA: CRA018229) that are publicly accessible at https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/gsa.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars (42025603), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42406134), the Qingdao New Energy Shandong Laboratory Open Project (QNESL OP202306), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2021YFF0502801), the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of CPSF (No. GZC20232713). We gratefully thank Ziming Yuan, Xiaoliang Ren, Aiyang Wang, and Lei An for their significant contributions to the sample collection. Sampling was conducted with permission from the Hainan Provincial Government.

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  1. Laboratory of Marine Organism Taxonomy and Phylogeny, Shandong Province Key Laboratory of Marine Biodiversity and Bio-resource Sustainable Utilization, Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Qingdao, China

    Zheng Zhang, Min Hui, Jiao Cheng & Zhongli Sha

  2. Laboratory for Marine Biology and Biotechnology, Qingdao Marine Science and Technology Center, Qingdao, China

    Zheng Zhang & Zhongli Sha

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  1. Zheng Zhang
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  2. Min Hui
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  3. Jiao Cheng
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All authors contributed intellectual input and assistance to this study and manuscript preparation. Z.Z.: Conceptualization; Methodology; Formal analysis; Investigation; Visualization; Writing-Original Draft. M.H.: Writing-Review & Editing; J.C.: Writing-Review & Editing; Z.S.: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Resources.

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Zhongli Sha.

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Zhang, Z., Hui, M., Cheng, J. et al. Warming and resource enhancement shape food webs in South China Sea coral reef system.
Commun Earth Environ (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-03147-7

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