Small-Scale Stabilizing Effect of Asynchrony in Vital Rate Responses to Climate in an Imperiled Dune Thistle.

Changes in population responses to climate are usually studied at broad spatial grains, such as across species ranges. Only a handful of studies have investigated how small-scale variation, for example driven by soil conditions and microtopography, can mediate the responses of population vital rates to climate. Here, we examine responses of vital rates to climate across five subpopulations occurring in coastal dune locations that range from the foredune to the backdune.

Forecasting range shifts of dioecious plants under climate change.

Global climate change has triggered an urgent need for predicting the reorganization of Earth's biodiversity. For dioecious species (those with separate sexes), it is unclear how commonly unique climate sensitivities of females and males could influence projections for species-level responses to climate change. We developed demographic models of range limitation, parameterized from geographically distributed common garden experiments, with females and males of a dioecious grass species () throughout and beyond its range in the south-central U.

Structured Demographic Buffering: A Framework to Explore the Environmental Components and Demographic Mechanisms Underlying Demographic Buffering.

Environmental stochasticity is a key determinant of population viability. Decades of work exploring how environmental stochasticity influences population dynamics have highlighted the ability of some natural populations to limit the negative effects of environmental stochasticity, one of the strategies being demographic buffering. Whilst various methods exist to quantify demographic buffering, we still do not know which environmental components and demographic mechanisms are most responsible for the demographic buffering observed in natural populations.

Diversity-stability relationships across organism groups and ecosystem types become decoupled across spatial scales.

The relationship between biodiversity and stability, or its inverse, temporal variability, is multidimensional and complex. Temporal variability in aggregate properties, like total biomass or abundance, is typically lower in communities with higher species diversity (i.e.

Demographic synthesis for global tree species conservation.

Conserving the tree species of the world requires syntheses on which tree species are most vulnerable to pressing threats, such as climate change, invasive pests and pathogens, or selective logging. Here, we review the population and forest dynamics models that, when parameterized with data from population studies, forest inventories, or tree rings, have been used for identifying life-history strategies of species and threat-related changes in population demography and dynamics. The available evidence suggests that slow-growing and/or long-lived species are the most vulnerable.

Two-Sex Demography, Sexual Niche Differentiation, and the Geographic Range Limits of Texas Bluegrass ().

AbstractUnderstanding the mechanisms that generate biogeographic range limits is a long-standing goal of ecology. It is widely hypothesized that distributional limits reflect the environmental niche, but this hypothesis is complicated by the potential for intraspecific niche heterogeneity. In dioecious species, sexual niche differentiation may cause divergence between the sexes in their limits of environmental suitability.

The myriad of complex demographic responses of terrestrial mammals to climate change and gaps of knowledge: A global analysis.

Approximately 25% of mammals are currently threatened with extinction, a risk that is amplified under climate change. Species persistence under climate change is determined by the combined effects of climatic factors on multiple demographic rates (survival, development and reproduction), and hence, population dynamics. Thus, to quantify which species and regions on Earth are most vulnerable to climate-driven extinction, a global understanding of how different demographic rates respond to climate is urgently needed.

Herbaceous perennial plants with short generation time have stronger responses to climate anomalies than those with longer generation time.

There is an urgent need to synthesize the state of our knowledge on plant responses to climate. The availability of open-access data provide opportunities to examine quantitative generalizations regarding which biomes and species are most responsive to climate drivers. Here, we synthesize time series of structured population models from 162 populations of 62 plants, mostly herbaceous species from temperate biomes, to link plant population growth rates (λ) to precipitation and temperature drivers.

Lagged and dormant season climate better predict plant vital rates than climate during the growing season.

Understanding the effects of climate on the vital rates (e.g., survival, development, reproduction) and dynamics of natural populations is a long-standing quest in ecology, with ever-increasing relevance in the face of climate change.

Can't live with them, can't live without them? Balancing mating and competition in two-sex populations.

Two-sex populations are usually studied through frequency-dependent models that describe how sex ratio affects mating, recruitment and population growth. However, in two-sex populations, mating and recruitment should also be affected by density and by its interactions with the sex ratio. Density may have positive effects on mating (Allee effects) but negative effects on other demographic processes.

Genetic mixture of multiple source populations accelerates invasive range expansion.

A wealth of population genetic studies have documented that many successful biological invasions stem from multiple introductions from genetically distinct source populations. Yet, mechanistic understanding of whether and how genetic mixture promotes invasiveness has lagged behind documentation that such mixture commonly occurs. We conducted a laboratory experiment to test the influence of genetic mixture on the velocity of invasive range expansion.

Functional traits explain variation in plant life history strategies.

Ecologists seek general explanations for the dramatic variation in species abundances in space and time. An increasingly popular solution is to predict species distributions, dynamics, and responses to environmental change based on easily measured anatomical and morphological traits. Trait-based approaches assume that simple functional traits influence fitness and life history evolution, but rigorous tests of this assumption are lacking, because they require quantitative information about the full lifecycles of many species representing different life histories.