Density dependence impacts our understanding of population resilience

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.

Add a Comment

You must log in to post a comment.


Comments

There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.

Downloads

Download Preprint

Supplementary Files
Authors

Christina Maria Hernandez, Iain Stott, David Koons, Rob Salguero-Gomez

Abstract

Current metrics of demographic resilience (e.g., resistance, recovery) summarize the potential responses of populations to the frequent, varied disturbances that ecological systems experience. Much of the application of these metrics has focused on the potential response of time-invariant, density-independent structured population models to hypothetical disturbances. Here, we examine such resilience measures in a flexible structured model with five vital rate parameters. Making one vital rate density-dependent at a time, we show that density dependence has profound and complex impacts on our understanding of resilience. Depending on which vital rate was subject to density effects, existing measures of demographic resilience (compensation, resistance, and recovery time) either increased or decreased with population density. Moreover, the density-independent model under-predicted the recovery time of the corresponding density-dependent model, with a greater offset for species with longer generation times and higher iteroparity. Our findings demonstrate the importance of underlying non-linear processes when examining demographic resilience.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32942/X23C9R

Subjects

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology

Keywords

amplification, COMADRE, COMPADRE, life history strategy, matrix population model, reactivity, recovery time, transient dynamics, COMADRE, COMPADRE, life history strategy, matrix population model, reactivity, recovery time, transient dynamics

Dates

Published: 2024-09-30 20:39

License

CC-BY Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Language:
English

Conflict of interest statement:
None.

Data and Code Availability Statement:
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at www.compadre-db.org.