Abstract
Persistence of ecological systems under climate change depends on how fast the environment is changing and on how species respond to that change. The rate of environmental change is a key factor affecting the responses. Adaptation, migration to more favorable habitats, and extinction are fundamental responses that species exhibit to climate change, but extinction is the most extreme one when species are unable to keep pace with climate change. The dynamics of extinction has long been addressed by theories of stochasticity, alternate states, and tipping points. But we are still lacking a non-equilibrium theory that explains how the rate of environmental change affects species responses, especially persistence. Here, we present spatial and non-spatial models of prey–predator interactions with Allee effect and show diverse responses characterized by different rates of environmental change. We show a community collapse to increasing rates of environmental change and also a stabilizing mechanism through unstable states of the non-spatial model. On the other hand, the spatially distributed community through dispersal exhibits multiple responses that include rescue effect, rate-driven extinction, and unexpected critical transitions and regime shifts. Furthermore, our results show a tracking of unstable states describing the role of unstable states in extinction debt and in maintaining spatial heterogeneity. Thus, this study reveals how the rate of environmental change reshapes community responses and predicts community persistence away from equilibrium states and also away from critical points.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the reviewers for the valuable suggestions.
Funding
RA received partial funding from the Centre for Applied Mathematics in Bioscience and Medicine (CAMBAM) to the postdoctoral research. FG received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for funding through the Discovery Grant program (RGPIN-2017-04266) and Discovery Accelerator Supplement (RGPAS-2017-507832). FL received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for funding through the Discovery Grant program (RGPIN-2016-04795) and for a Discovery Accelerator Supplement (RGPAS-2016-492872).
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Arumugam, R., Guichard, F. & Lutscher, F. Persistence and extinction dynamics driven by the rate of environmental change in a predator–prey metacommunity. Theor Ecol 13, 629–643 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00473-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-020-00473-8