AI Article Synopsis
- Predicting population declines is crucial due to global environmental changes, and abundance-based early warning signals often indicate potential collapses, but they can be unreliable.
- This study uses 20th-century historical data on harvested whales to show that reliable body size data also reveals early warning signs of population issues, alongside abundance data.
- The findings indicate that during commercial whaling, the mean body size of caught whales significantly decreased, suggesting early warning signals could be detected up to 40 years before a collapse, and combining data types improves prediction accuracy.
Article Abstract
Predicting population declines is a key challenge in the face of global environmental change. Abundance-based early warning signals have been shown to precede population collapses; however, such signals are sensitive to the low reliability of abundance estimates. Here, using historical data on whales harvested during the 20th century, we demonstrate that early warning signals can be present not only in the abundance data, but also in the more reliable body size data of wild populations. We show that during the period of commercial whaling, the mean body size of caught whales declined dramatically (by up to 4 m over a 70-year period), leading to early warning signals being detectable up to 40 years before the global collapse of whale stocks. Combining abundance and body size data can reduce the length of the time series required to predict collapse, and decrease the chances of false positive early warning signals.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0188 | DOI Listing |
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