Landscape Structure Affects Metapopulation-Scale Tipping Points.

Autor: Saade, Camille, Fronhofer, Emanuel A., Pichon, Benoît, Kéfi, Sonia
Předmět:
Zdroj: American Naturalist; Jul2023, Vol. 202 Issue 1, pE17-E30, 14p
Abstrakt: Even when environments deteriorate gradually, ecosystems may shift abruptly from one state to another. Such catastrophic shifts are difficult to predict and sometimes to reverse (so-called hysteresis). While well studied in simplified contexts, we lack a general understanding of how catastrophic shifts spread in realistically spatially structured landscapes. For different types of landscape structures, including typical terrestrial modular and riverine dendritic networks, we here investigate landscape-scale stability in metapopulations whose patches can locally exhibit catastrophic shifts. We find that such metapopulations usually exhibit large-scale catastrophic shifts and hysteresis and that the properties of these shifts depend strongly on the metapopulation spatial structure and on the population dispersal rate: an intermediate dispersal rate, a low average degree, or a riverine spatial structure can largely reduce hysteresis size. Our study suggests that large-scale restoration is easier with spatially clustered restoration efforts and in populations characterized by an intermediate dispersal rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Databáze: Complementary Index