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Attempts to gauge the biological impacts of climate change have typically focussed on the lower levels of organization (individuals to populations), rather than considering more complex multi-species systems, such as entire ecological networks (food webs, mutualistic and host–parasitoid networks). We evaluate the possibility that a few principal drivers underpin network-level responses to climate change, and that these drivers can be studied to develop a more coherent theoretical framework than is currently provided by phenomenological approaches. For instance, warming will elevate individual ectotherm metabolic rates, and direct and indirect effects of changes in atmospheric conditions are expected to alter the stoichiometry of interactions between primary consumers and basal resources; these effects are general and pervasive, and will permeate through the entire networks that they affect. In addition …