TY - JOUR T1 - Human activities influence the direction and magnitude of local biodiversity change over time JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/162362 SP - 162362 AU - Jillian C Dunic AU - Robin Elahi AU - Marc J. S. Hensel AU - Patrick J. Kearns AU - Mary I. O’Connor AU - Daniel Acuña AU - Aaron Honig AU - Alexa R. Wilson AU - Jarrett E. K. Byrnes Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/12/162362.abstract N2 - In recent decades, environmental drivers of community change have been associated with changes in biodiversity from local to global scales. Here we evaluate the role of anthropogenic drivers in marine ecosystems as drivers of change in local species richness with a meta-analysis of a novel dataset of temporal change in species richness. We paired biodiversity data from 144 sites with large-scale drivers derived from geospatial databases: human cumulative impacts, sea surface temperature change, nutrient loading, and invasion potential. Three specific drivers (nutrient inputs, rate of linear temperature change, and non-native species invasion potential) explained patterns in local species richness change. We show that these drivers have opposing effects on biodiversity trends, and in some cases, contrasting directions of change can offset each other to yield observations of no net change across localities. Further, long-term studies reveal different effects of drivers that are not observed in short-term studies. These findings begin to explain high variability observed in species diversity trends at local scales. We suggest that local species diversity change is a predictable phenomenon and that observations of no net change across many time-series can be explained when the contrasting effects of human impacts are considered. ER -