Table 1.

Adapted from Hoover et al. [4,40], in which both a statistically extreme drought and heatwave were imposed on an intact grassland ecosystem over a 2-year period, and responses across multiple levels of ecological organization were assessed. Checked boxes indicate detectable impacts to that ecological level, while unchecked boxes signify no detectable effects. The experimental results demonstrate how responses can propagate across levels of organization during and after a climate extreme, and how both individual and community-level processes may both scale to the ecosystem level. Of equal importance is how two types of climate extremes yielded different dynamics; while responses cascaded across multiple levels of organization for extreme drought, the impacts from heatwave were not detectable beyond the physiological level. Such differences may very well be attributed to differential durations of the extremes, as the heatwaves were of much shorter durations than the drought. Nevertheless, the dynamics of how responses propagate across levels of organization within an ecosystem during or after an extreme are likely to differ depending on the type of climate extreme the system experiences, as well as the underlying characteristics of the extreme.