Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations
Understanding how populations respond to increasingly variable conditions is a major objective for natural resource managers forecasting extinction risk. The lesson from current modelling is clear: increasing environmental variability increases population abundance variability. We show that this par...
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| Language: | English |
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The Royal Society
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Royal Society Open Science |
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| Online Access: | https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.241066 |
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| author | Nicholas Kortessis José Miguel Ponciano Franz W. Simon Jake M. Ferguson |
| author_facet | Nicholas Kortessis José Miguel Ponciano Franz W. Simon Jake M. Ferguson |
| author_sort | Nicholas Kortessis |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Understanding how populations respond to increasingly variable conditions is a major objective for natural resource managers forecasting extinction risk. The lesson from current modelling is clear: increasing environmental variability increases population abundance variability. We show that this paradigm fails to describe a broad class of empirically observed dynamics, namely endogenously driven population cycles. In contrast to the dominant paradigm, these populations can exhibit reduced long-run population variance under increasing environmental variability. We provide evidence for a mechanistic explanation of this phenomenon that relies on how stochasticity interacts with long transient dynamics present in the deterministic cycling model. This interaction stands in contrast to the often assumed additivity of stochastic and deterministic drivers of population fluctuations. We show evidence for the phenomenon in two cyclical populations: flour beetles and Canadian lynx. We quantify the impact of the phenomenon with new theory that partitions the effects of nonlinear dynamics and stochastic variation on dynamical systems. In both empirical examples, the partitioning shows that the interaction between deterministic and stochastic dynamics reduces the variance in population size. Our results highlight that previous predictions about extinction under environmental variability may prove inadequate to understand the effects of climate change in some populations. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-6ebefae14c754de5acfc2380ecc91f7a |
| institution | DOAJ |
| issn | 2054-5703 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2024-12-01 |
| publisher | The Royal Society |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Royal Society Open Science |
| spelling | doaj-art-6ebefae14c754de5acfc2380ecc91f7a2025-08-20T02:49:09ZengThe Royal SocietyRoyal Society Open Science2054-57032024-12-01111210.1098/rsos.241066Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populationsNicholas Kortessis0José Miguel Ponciano1Franz W. Simon2Jake M. Ferguson3Department of Biology, Wake Forest University, Winston Salem, NC 27109, USADepartment of Biology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USADepartment of Biology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USADepartment of Biology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USAUnderstanding how populations respond to increasingly variable conditions is a major objective for natural resource managers forecasting extinction risk. The lesson from current modelling is clear: increasing environmental variability increases population abundance variability. We show that this paradigm fails to describe a broad class of empirically observed dynamics, namely endogenously driven population cycles. In contrast to the dominant paradigm, these populations can exhibit reduced long-run population variance under increasing environmental variability. We provide evidence for a mechanistic explanation of this phenomenon that relies on how stochasticity interacts with long transient dynamics present in the deterministic cycling model. This interaction stands in contrast to the often assumed additivity of stochastic and deterministic drivers of population fluctuations. We show evidence for the phenomenon in two cyclical populations: flour beetles and Canadian lynx. We quantify the impact of the phenomenon with new theory that partitions the effects of nonlinear dynamics and stochastic variation on dynamical systems. In both empirical examples, the partitioning shows that the interaction between deterministic and stochastic dynamics reduces the variance in population size. Our results highlight that previous predictions about extinction under environmental variability may prove inadequate to understand the effects of climate change in some populations.https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.241066long transientnonlinear dynamicsextinction riskstabilitystochasticity |
| spellingShingle | Nicholas Kortessis José Miguel Ponciano Franz W. Simon Jake M. Ferguson Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations Royal Society Open Science long transient nonlinear dynamics extinction risk stability stochasticity |
| title | Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations |
| title_full | Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations |
| title_fullStr | Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations |
| title_full_unstemmed | Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations |
| title_short | Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations |
| title_sort | increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations |
| topic | long transient nonlinear dynamics extinction risk stability stochasticity |
| url | https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.241066 |
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