Harder Avril M, Sundaram Mekala, Narine Lana L, Willoughby Janna R
College of Forestry, Wildlife and Environment Auburn University Auburn Alabama USA.
Department of Integrative Biology Oklahoma State University Stillwater Oklahoma USA.
Ecol Evol. 2023 Aug 2;13(8):e10358. doi: 10.1002/ece3.10358. eCollection 2023 Aug.
The increasing availability of satellite imagery has supported a rapid expansion in forward-looking studies seeking to track and predict how climate change will influence wild population dynamics. However, these data can also be used in retrospect to provide additional context for historical data in the absence of contemporaneous environmental measurements. We used 167 Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) images spanning 13 years to identify environmental drivers of fitness and population size in a well-characterized population of banner-tailed kangaroo rats () in the southwestern United States. We found evidence of two decoupled processes that may be driving population dynamics in opposing directions over distinct time frames. Specifically, increasing mean surface temperature corresponded to increased individual fitness, where fitness is defined as the number of offspring produced by a single individual. This result contrasts with our findings for population size, where increasing surface temperature led to decreased numbers of active mounds. These relationships between surface temperature and (i) individual fitness and (ii) population size would not have been identified in the absence of remotely sensed data, indicating that such information can be used to test existing hypotheses and generate new ecological predictions regarding fitness at multiple spatial scales and degrees of sampling effort. To our knowledge, this study is the first to directly link remotely sensed environmental data to individual fitness in a nearly exhaustively sampled population, opening a new avenue for incorporating remote sensing data into eco-evolutionary studies.
卫星图像的日益普及为前瞻性研究的迅速扩展提供了支持，这些研究旨在追踪和预测气候变化将如何影响野生种群动态。然而，在缺乏同期环境测量数据的情况下，这些数据也可用于回顾性分析，为历史数据提供更多背景信息。我们使用了跨越13年的167幅陆地卫星5号专题制图仪（TM）图像，来确定美国西南部一个特征明确的旗尾更格卢鼠种群中健康状况和种群规模的环境驱动因素。我们发现了两个解耦过程的证据，这两个过程可能在不同的时间框架内以相反的方向推动种群动态变化。具体而言，地表平均温度升高与个体健康状况增加相对应，这里的健康状况定义为单个个体产生的后代数量。这一结果与我们对种群规模的研究结果形成对比，在种群规模方面，地表温度升高导致活动土丘数量减少。如果没有遥感数据，地表温度与（i）个体健康状况和（ii）种群规模之间的这些关系就不会被发现，这表明此类信息可用于检验现有假设，并就多个空间尺度和不同采样力度下的健康状况生成新的生态预测。据我们所知，这项研究首次将遥感环境数据与一个几乎被详尽采样的种群中的个体健康状况直接联系起来，为将遥感数据纳入生态进化研究开辟了一条新途径。
