Centre for Biodiversity Theory and Modelling, Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station, CNRS and Paul Sabatier University, 09200, Moulis, France.
Trinity College Dublin, School of Natural Sciences, Zoology Building, Dublin, 2, Ireland.
Ecology. 2019 Feb;100(2):e02586. doi: 10.1002/ecy.2586.
An enduring challenge for ecology is identifying the drivers of ecosystem and population stability. In a spatially explicit context, key features to consider are landscape spatial structure, local interactions, and dispersal. Substantial work has been done on each of these features as a driver of stability, but little is known on the interplay between them. Missing has been a more integrative approach, able to map and identify different dynamical regimes, predicting a system's response to perturbations. Here we first consider a simple scenario, i.e., the recovery of a homogeneous metapopulation from a single localized pulse disturbance. The analysis of this scenario reveals three fundamental recovery regimes: Isolated Regime when dispersal is not significant, Rescue Regime when dispersal mediates recovery, and Mixing Regime when perturbations spread throughout the system. Despite its simplicity, our approach leads to remarkably general predictions. These include the qualitatively different outcomes of various scenarios of habitat fragmentation, the surprising benefits of local extinctions on population persistence at the transition between regimes, and the productivity shifts of metacommunities in a changing environment. This study thus provides context to known results and insight into future directions of research.
生态学的一个持久挑战是确定生态系统和种群稳定性的驱动因素。在空间显式的背景下，需要考虑的关键特征包括景观空间结构、局部相互作用和扩散。在这些特征中，有大量关于它们作为稳定性驱动因素的工作，但对它们之间的相互作用知之甚少。缺少的是一种更具综合性的方法，能够映射和识别不同的动力学状态，预测系统对扰动的反应。在这里，我们首先考虑一个简单的情况，即从单个局部脉冲干扰中恢复均匀的集合种群。对这种情况的分析揭示了三种基本的恢复状态：当扩散不显著时为隔离状态，当扩散介导恢复时为拯救状态，当干扰在整个系统中传播时为混合状态。尽管简单，但我们的方法得出了非常普遍的预测。这些预测包括各种生境破碎化情景的定性不同结果、局部灭绝在状态转变过程中对种群持久性的意外好处，以及在变化环境中集合群落的生产力转移。因此，本研究为已知结果提供了背景，并为未来的研究方向提供了新的思路。
