Journal
ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Volume 36, Issue 3, Pages 364-378Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/1440-1703.12214
Keywords
community dynamics; empirical dynamic modeling; energy landscape analysis; metacommunity; time series
Categories
Funding
- British Ecological Society [TT19/1029]
- Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology [JPMJCR13A2]
- Irish Research Council [GOIPG/2018/3023]
- Japan Science and Technology Agency [19H05641]
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science [16H04846, JP20J10699]
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [19H05641] Funding Source: KAKEN
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Understanding of ecological stability is based on assumptions of scale, which limit the generalizable and mechanistic understanding of stability under global environmental change. Moving towards a multiscale approach allows for better understanding of the intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of ecological stability, and highlights the confounding effect of scale on the observation of ecological dynamics.
Our knowledge of ecological stability is built on assumptions of scale. These assumptions limit our ability to reach a generalizable and mechanistic understanding of stability under global environmental change. Moving towards a multiscale approach-across space, time and environment-will allow us to better understand the intrinsic (e.g., demographic) and extrinsic (environmental) drivers of ecological stability. In this perspective, we review multiple sources of variation responsible for shaping ecological dynamics, and how scale affects our observation of these dynamics through its confounding effect on drivers of variation in ecosystems. We discuss the effect of temporal scale when combining empirical dynamic modeling with high-resolution population time series to consider the time-varying nature of multispecies interaction networks, highlighting interspecific interactions as an intrinsic driver of community dynamics. Next, we examine energy landscape analysis as a method for inferring stability and transience during community assembly and its interaction with spatial scale, emphasizing the intrinsic role of compositional variability in assembly dynamics. We then examine population dynamics at species' range margins and show how considering the interaction between spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity, an extrinsic driver of population dynamics, can facilitate a nuanced understanding of population expansions, range shifts, and species invasions. Finally, we discuss broadly how the sources of intrinsic and extrinsic variation interact with each other and with spatiotemporal scale to shape ecological dynamics. Better recognition of the scale-dependent nature of the relationship between drivers of variation and ecological dynamics will be invaluable to illuminate the dynamics influencing ecological stability across scales.
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