State Key Laboratory of Grassland Agro-ecosystems, College of Ecology & School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China.
Institute of Evolution and Ecology, College of Life Sciences, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.
Integr Zool. 2023 Sep;18(5):831-842. doi: 10.1111/1749-4877.12665. Epub 2022 Jun 24.
One classic system of pulsed resource and animal population is mast seeding and population dynamics of seed-eating rodents in forests. However, we still lack an understanding of the global patterns regarding the contributions of seed falls to rodent outbreaks or population dynamics. We analyzed a global dataset of coupled long-term time series of seed abundances and rodent populations from published literature, including 66 and 89 time series (156 rodent-seed pairs from 37 studies) for rodent and seed abundances, respectively. We found only half of the examined rodent populations showed statistically significant coincidence between rodent outbreak and mast-seeding years. Over all the coupled time series, seed abundance was found to positively correlate with rodent abundance with a one-year lag, and the relative importance of seed abundance was much lower than that of density dependence in affecting rodent population growth rates. We also found the relative importance of seed abundance decreased, but that of rodent density dependence increased with the latitude of study. For the first time, our work provides a global pattern on the associations between seed falls and rodent population dynamics mostly in mid- and high-latitude forests, and highlights the necessity of more long-term studies on this subject in more forest ecosystems.
一个经典的脉冲资源和动物种群系统是林中大果榆结实和食果啮齿动物的种群动态。然而，我们仍然缺乏对全球范围内种实掉落对啮齿动物爆发或种群动态的贡献模式的理解。我们分析了来自文献的全球耦合长期时间序列数据集，包括啮齿动物和种子丰度的 66 个和 89 个时间序列（来自 37 项研究的 156 对啮齿动物-种子对）。我们发现，在所检查的啮齿动物种群中，只有一半表现出啮齿动物爆发和结实大年之间具有统计学上的显著一致性。在所有耦合的时间序列中，种子丰度与啮齿动物丰度呈正相关，且具有一年的滞后，而种子丰度的相对重要性远低于密度依赖性对啮齿动物种群增长率的影响。我们还发现，随着研究地点的纬度增加，种子丰度的相对重要性降低，而啮齿动物密度依赖性的相对重要性增加。这是首次在中高纬度森林中对种实掉落与啮齿动物种群动态之间的关联进行全球模式研究，强调了在更多森林生态系统中对这一主题进行更多长期研究的必要性。
