Ecosystems are subjected to increasing exposure to multiple anthropogenic drivers. This has led to the development of national and international accounting systems describing the condition of ecosystems, often based on few, highly aggregated indicators. Such accounting systems would benefit from a stronger theoretical and empirical underpinning of ecosystem dynamics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMarine ecosystems are experiencing growing pressure from multiple threats caused by human activities, with far-reaching consequences for marine food webs. Determining the effects of multiple stressors is complex, in part, as they can affect different aspects of biological organisation (behaviour, individual traits and demographic rates). Determining the combined effects of stressors, through different biological pathways, is key to predict the consequences for the viability of populations threatened by global change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActuarial senescence, the decline of survival with age, is well documented in the wild. Rates of senescence vary widely between taxa, to some extent also between sexes, with the fastest life histories showing the highest rates of senescence. Few studies have investigated differences in senescence among populations of the same species, although such variation is expected from population-level differences in environmental conditions, leading to differences in vital rates and thus life histories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
December 2022
Studies of spatial population synchrony constitute a central approach for understanding the drivers of ecological dynamics. Recently, identifying the ecological impacts of climate change has emerged as a new important focus in population synchrony studies. However, while it is well known that climatic seasonality and sequential density dependence influences local population dynamics, the role of season-specific density dependence in shaping large-scale population synchrony has not received attention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhat drives ecosystem buildup, diversity, and stability? We assess species arrival and ecosystem changes across 16 millennia by combining regional-scale plant sedimentary ancient DNA from Fennoscandia with near-complete DNA and trait databases. We show that postglacial arrival time varies within and between plant growth forms. Further, arrival times were mainly predicted by adaptation to temperature, disturbance, and light.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDemographic buffering and lability have been identified as adaptive strategies to optimise fitness in a fluctuating environment. These are not mutually exclusive, however, we lack efficient methods to measure their relative importance for a given life history. Here, we decompose the stochastic growth rate (fitness) into components arising from nonlinear responses and variance-covariance of demographic parameters to an environmental driver, which allows studying joint effects of buffering and lability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTemporal correlations among demographic parameters can strongly influence population dynamics. Our empirical knowledge, however, is very limited regarding the direction and the magnitude of these correlations and how they vary among demographic parameters and species' life histories. Here, we use long-term demographic data from 15 bird and mammal species with contrasting pace of life to quantify correlation patterns among five key demographic parameters: juvenile and adult survival, reproductive probability, reproductive success and productivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA standardized delineation of the world's mountains has many applications in research, education, and the science-policy interface. Here we provide a new inventory of 8616 mountain ranges developed under the auspices of the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment (GMBA). Building on an earlier compilation, the presented geospatial database uses a further advanced and generalized mountain definition and a semi-automated method to enable globally standardized, transparent delineations of mountain ranges worldwide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGlob Chang Biol
June 2022
Rare species are challenging to study, in part because rarity can take many forms. Jeliazkov et al. guide us through the multiple decisions to be made-from sampling designs to field methods and analytical, integrated models.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe high occurrence of social monogamy in birds has led to questions about partner fidelity, or the perennial nature of monogamy from one breeding season to another. Despite the evolutionary advantages of partner fidelity, divorce occurs among 95% of bird species. We aimed to describe patterns of divorce and partner fidelity in five seabird species breeding in Arctic and Antarctic regions and investigated the influence of breeding status on pair bond maintenance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
September 2021
Ecologists are still puzzled by the diverse population dynamics of herbivorous small mammals that range from high-amplitude, multiannual cycles to stable dynamics. Theory predicts that this diversity results from combinations of climatic seasonality, weather stochasticity, and density-dependent food web interactions. The almost ubiquitous 3- to 5-y cycles in boreal and arctic climates may theoretically result from bottom-up (plant-herbivore) and top-down (predator-prey) interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe effects of climate change on species richness are debated but can be informed by the past. Here, we generated a sedimentary ancient DNA dataset covering 10 lakes and applied novel methods for data harmonization. We assessed the impact of Holocene climate changes and nutrients on terrestrial plant richness in northern Fennoscandia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe increasing severity and frequency of natural disturbances requires a better understanding of their effects on all compartments of biodiversity. In Northern Fennoscandia, recent large-scale moth outbreaks have led to an abrupt change in plant communities from birch forests dominated by dwarf shrubs to grass-dominated systems. However, the indirect effects on the belowground compartment remained unclear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe current warming of the oceans has been shown to have detrimental effects for a number of species. An understanding of the underlying mechanisms may be hampered by the non-linearity and non-stationarity of the relationships between temperature and demography, and by the insufficient length of available time series. Most demographic time series are too short to study the effects of climate on wildlife in the classical sense of meteorological patterns over at least 30 years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMountain areas are biodiversity hotspots and provide a multitude of ecosystem services of irreplaceable socio-economic value. In the European Alps, air temperature has increased at a rate of about 0.36°C decade since 1970, leading to glacier retreat and significant snowpack reduction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn species providing extended parental care, one or both parents care for altricial young over a period including more than one breeding season. We expect large parental investment and long-term dependency within family units to cause high variability in life trajectories among individuals with complex consequences at the population level. So far, models for estimating demographic parameters in free-ranging animal populations mostly ignore extended parental care, thereby limiting our understanding of its consequences on parents and offspring life histories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClimate change is commonly associated with many species redistributions and the influence of other factors may be marginalized, especially in the rapidly warming Arctic.The Barents Sea, a high latitude large marine ecosystem in the Northeast Atlantic has experienced above-average temperatures since the mid-2000s with divergent bottom temperature trends at subregional scales.Concurrently, the Barents Sea stock of Atlantic cod one of the most important commercial fish stocks in the world, increased following a large reduction in fishing pressure and expanded north of 80°N.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPopulation dynamic models combine density dependence and environmental effects. Ignoring sampling uncertainty might lead to biased estimation of the strength of density dependence. This is typically addressed using state-space model approaches, which integrate sampling error and population process estimates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTemperatures in mountain areas are increasing at a higher rate than the Northern Hemisphere land average, but how fauna may respond, in particular in terms of phenology, remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to assess how elevation could modify the relationships between climate variability (air temperature and snow melt-out date), the timing of plant phenology and egg-laying date of the coal tit (). We collected 9 years (2011-2019) of data on egg-laying date, spring air temperature, snow melt-out date, and larch budburst date at two elevations (~1,300 m and ~1,900 m asl) on a slope located in the Mont-Blanc Massif in the French Alps.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn (st)age-structured populations, the long-run population growth rate is negatively affected by temporal variation in vital rates. In most cases, natural selection should minimize temporal variation in the vital rates to which the long-run population growth is most sensitive, resulting in demographic buffering. By reviewing empirical studies on demographic buffering in wild populations, we found overall support for this hypothesis.
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