A simplified approach for assessing the effects of temperature change on the stability of consumer–resource interactions

Temperature regulates the physiology and behaviour of organisms. Thus, changing temperatures impact the dynamics of species interactions. Considering that consumer–resource interactions underpin ecological communities, the impacts of warming on the stability of consumer–resource interactions have been extensively studied. However, a consensus among empirically determined warming–stability relationships and a clear understanding thereof are lacking. We investigate these relationships systematically by developing a simplified theoretical framework that incorporates empirical data in three steps. We define stability in terms of intrinsic oscillations to avoid comparing disparate stability notions, use a one‐dimensional stability metric and convert all empirically‐determined thermal dependence parametersiations into a single function, to directly compare all data. The framework utilises the Rosenzweig–MacArthur model with a saturating consumer functional response, which has been extensively employed to study warming‐stability relationships in consumer–resource interactions. The framework is applied on empirical data on the thermal dependence of ectotherm consumer–resource pairs. We find support for four different warming–stability relationships: stability increases, decreases, is hump‐shaped or U‐shaped with increasing temperature. The diversity of warming–stability relationships, though partly attributable to context‐dependence, is fundamentally caused by two factors. First, the relative thermal sensitivities of attack rate and handling time and, second, the scarcity of empirical evidence for the thermal dependence of carrying capacity. The former depends on how these processes are measured, which may not be consistent across studies. The latter necessitates the application of assumptions, which are difficult to verify, yet have a significant impact on warming–stability relationships. We demonstrate how aspects of the data, such as the two aforementioned factors or the range of studied temperatures, can alter the predicted thermal dependence of stability. Thus, we illustrate how our framework facilitates the study of warming–stability relationships in consumer–resource interactions, from producing a concise overview of the empirically determined predictions to analysing the causes of deviation among these.