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Size-by-environment interactions: a neglected dimension of species’ responses to environmental variation

View ORCID ProfileAndrew T. Tredennick, Brittany J. Teller, Peter B. Adler, Giles Hooker, Stephen P. Ellner
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/329771
Andrew T. Tredennick
1Department of Wildland Resources and the Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, Utah
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  • For correspondence: atredenn@gmail.com
Brittany J. Teller
2Department of Biology, Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania
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Peter B. Adler
1Department of Wildland Resources and the Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, Utah
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Giles Hooker
3Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
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Stephen P. Ellner
4Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
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Abstract

In both plant and animal systems, size can determine whether an individual survives and grows under different environmental conditions. However, it is less clear whether and when size-dependent responses to the environment affect population dynamics. Size-by-environment interactions create pathways for environmental fluctuations to influence population dynamics by allowing for negative covariation between sizes within vital rates (e.g., small and large individuals have negatively covarying survival rates) and/or size-dependent variability in a vital rate (e.g., survival of large individuals varies less than small individuals through time). Whether these phenomena affect population dynamics depends on how they are mediated by elasticities (they must affect the sizes and vital rates that matter) and their projected impacts will depend on model functional form (the impact of reduced variance depends on the relationship between the environment and vital rate). We demonstrate these ideas with an analysis of fifteen species from five semiarid plant communities. We find that size-by-environment interactions are common but do not impact long-term population dynamics. Size-by-environment interactions may yet be important for other species. Our approach can be applied to species in other ecosystems to determine if and how size-by-environment interactions allow them to cope with, or exploit, fluctuating environments.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 24, 2018.
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Size-by-environment interactions: a neglected dimension of species’ responses to environmental variation
Andrew T. Tredennick, Brittany J. Teller, Peter B. Adler, Giles Hooker, Stephen P. Ellner
bioRxiv 329771; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/329771
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Size-by-environment interactions: a neglected dimension of species’ responses to environmental variation
Andrew T. Tredennick, Brittany J. Teller, Peter B. Adler, Giles Hooker, Stephen P. Ellner
bioRxiv 329771; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/329771

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