PREFACE Editorial Commentary: Global Change in Multispecies Systems Part 2

Volume 47 of Advances in Ecological Research is the second in a series of three that address awide-ranging theme in contemporary ecology: global change in multispecies systems. In the previous volume, the ecological consequences of various environmental stressorswere explored ( JacobandWoodward, 2012), including several of the different components of climate change (Ledger et al., 2012; Meerhoff et al., 2012; Mintenbeck et al., 2012), habitat loss and fragmentation (Hagen et al., 2012), land use (Mulder et al., 2012), and resource exploitation (Rossberg, 2012), and the consequences for biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and the provisioning of goods and services of value to human societieswere considered. In this volume, different aspects of these themes are explored, while once again covering both the aquatic and the terrestrial realms. The topics addressed here include assessing consequences of global change in terrestrial food webs (Moya-Larano et al., 2012), in marine predator–prey relationships (Peck et al., 2012; Twomey et al., 2012) that can triggerwhole-system regime shifts (Möllmann andDiekmann, 2012) aswell as in freshwater ( Jeppesen et al., 2012;O’Gormanet al., 2012) systems.New,multidisciplinary territory is exploredby addressinghowwarming affects different spatiotemporal scales and organisational levels (O’Gorman et al., 2012), and how it might alter eco-evolutionary dynamics (Moya-Larano et al., 2012), as well as considering the prospects for bioremediation of eutrophication on a global scale ( Jeppesen et al., 2012). The third thematic volume in this series will consider more ecosystem-level effects and methodological approaches, including analysing and visualisation responses of complex multispecies data, such as size-spectra, food webs and mutualistic networks: thus the three volumes in combination aim to provide a broad and deep coverage of global change in multispecies systems. A rangeof different approaches are presented in this volume, reflecting the challenges associatedwith gauging the impacts of the drivers of global change,