Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 367, Issue 1605, Pages 2945-2954Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0234
Keywords
dispersal mortality; extinctions; food webs; migration; rescue effect; spatial model
Categories
Funding
- ESF
- German Research Foundation [JA 1726/3-1]
- Cluster of Excellence CliSAP, University of Hamburg through the DFG [EXC177]
- Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning
- SOEB
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Climate change is increasingly affecting the structure and dynamics of ecological communities both at local and at regional scales, and this can be expected to have important consequences for their robustness and long-term persistence. The aim of the present work is to analyse how the spatial structure of the landscape and dispersal patterns of species (dispersal rate and average dispersal distance) affects metacommunity response to two disturbances: (i) increased mortality during dispersal and (ii) local species extinction. We analyse the disturbances both in isolation and in combination. Using a spatially and dynamically explicit metacommunity model, we find that the effect of dispersal on metacommunity persistence is two-sided: on the one hand, high dispersal significantly reduces the risk of bottom-up extinction cascades following the local removal of a species; on the other hand, when dispersal imposes a risk to the dispersing individuals, high dispersal increases extinction risks, especially when dispersal is global. Large-bodied species with long generation times at the highest trophic level are particularly vulnerable to extinction when dispersal involves a risk. This suggests that decreasing the mortality risk of dispersing individuals by improving the quality of the habitat matrix may greatly increase the robustness of metacommunities.
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