RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Eco-evolutionary processes underlying early warning signals of population declines
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 422915
DO 10.1101/422915
A1 Gaurav Baruah
A1 Christopher F. Clements
A1 Arpat Ozgul
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/29/422915.abstract
AB Environmental change can impact the stability of populations and can cause rapid declines in abundance. Abundance-based warning signals have been proposed to predict such declines, but these have been shown to have limited success, leading to the development of warning signals based on the distribution of fitness-related traits such as body size.The dynamics of such traits in response to external environmental perturbations are controlled by a range of underlying factors such as reproductive rate, genetic variation, and plasticity. However, it remains unknown how such ecological and evolutionary factors affect the stability landscape of populations and the detectability of abundance and trait-based warning signals of population decline.Here, we apply a trait-based demographic approach and investigate both trait and population dynamics in response to gradual changes in the environment. We explore a range of ecological and evolutionary constraints under which the stability of a population may be affected.We show both analytically and with model-based simulations that strength of abundance-based early warning signals is significantly affected by ecological and evolutionary factors.Finally, we show that a unified approach, combining trait- and abundance-based information, significantly improves our ability to predict population declines. Our study suggests that the inclusion of trait dynamic information alongside generic warning signals should provide more accurate forecasts of the future state of biological systems.