van de Pol, Martijn, Vindenes, Yngvild, Sæther, Bernt-erik, Engen, Steinar, Ens, Bruno, Oosterbeek, Kees, and Tinbergen, Joost M. (2011) Poor environmental tracking can make extinction risk insensitive to the colour of environmental noise. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B, Biological Sciences, 278 (1725). pp. 3713-3722.

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Abstract

The relative importance of environmental colour for extinction risk compared with other aspects of environmental noise (mean and interannual variability) is poorly understood. Such knowledge is currently relevant, as climate change can cause the mean, variability and temporal autocorrelation of environmental variables to change. Here, we predict that the extinction risk of a shorebird population increases with the colour of a key environmental variable: winter temperature. However, the effect is weak compared with the impact of changes in the mean and interannual variability of temperature. Extinction risk was largely insensitive to noise colour, because demographic rates are poor in tracking the colour of the environment. We show that three mechanisms—which probably act in many species—can cause poor environmental tracking: (i) demographic rates that depend nonlinearly on environmental variables filter the noise colour, (ii) demographic rates typically depend on several environmental signals that do not change colour synchronously, and (iii) demographic stochasticity whitens the colour of demographic rates at low population size. We argue that the common practice of assuming perfect environmental tracking may result in overemphasizing the importance of noise colour for extinction risk. Consequently, ignoring environmental autocorrelation in population viability analysis could be less problematic than generally thought.

Item ID:	80088
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1471-2954
Keywords:	climatic variability; demographic and environmental stochasticity; noise filtering; nonlinearity; population viability analysis; temporal autocorrelation
Copyright Information:	© 2011 The Royal Society.
Date Deposited:	01 Sep 2023 03:54
FoR Codes:	31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310307 Population ecology @ 100%
SEO Codes:	19 ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY, CLIMATE CHANGE AND NATURAL HAZARDS > 1905 Understanding climate change > 190502 Climate variability (excl. social impacts) @ 100%
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