Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zurich, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland.
Ecol Lett. 2018 Nov;21(11):1589-1603. doi: 10.1111/ele.13108. Epub 2018 Sep 5.
Forecasting the impacts of climate change on biological diversity requires better ways to incorporate competitive interactions into predictions of species' range dynamics and persistence. This problem has been studied extensively in a different context by theoreticians evaluating the coexistence of species in spatially heterogeneous environments. Here, we show how spatial coexistence theory can be adapted to provide a mathematical framework for understanding species persistence in competitive communities under climate change. We first show how the spatial low-density growth rate provides the relevant metric of species persistence along a climate gradient. We then analyse a model of multiple migrating competitors to show how mechanisms contributing to low-density growth rates quantify the effect of different competitive processes on persistence, and how these processes change in strength with species' asynchronous migration under climate change. Finally, we outline the empirical utility of the framework, showing how the theory can scale up from local measurements of species performance and competitive interactions to range-scale metrics of persistence. Treating species' range dynamics as a geographical-scale coexistence problem presents its own set of challenges, but building from a well-established body of theory may greatly improve the predictability of species persistence in competitive communities under climate change.
预测气候变化对生物多样性的影响需要更好的方法，将竞争相互作用纳入物种分布动态和持久性的预测中。在不同的背景下，理论家们通过评估空间异质环境中物种共存的问题，对这个问题进行了广泛的研究。在这里，我们展示了如何适应空间共存理论，为理解气候变化下竞争群落中物种的持久性提供一个数学框架。我们首先展示了空间低密度增长率如何为沿着气候梯度的物种持久性提供相关的度量标准。然后，我们分析了一个多迁移竞争者的模型，以展示有助于低密度增长率的机制如何量化不同竞争过程对持久性的影响，以及这些过程在气候变化下物种异步迁移下的强度如何变化。最后，我们概述了该框架的经验实用性，展示了如何从物种表现和竞争相互作用的局部测量扩展到持久性的范围尺度度量。将物种的分布动态视为地理尺度上的共存问题本身就带来了一系列挑战，但从成熟的理论体系出发，可能会大大提高在气候变化下竞争群落中物种持久性的可预测性。
