Disentangling how climate and dispersal drive temporal trends in synchronous population dynamics
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Spatially synchronised population dynamics are driven by a combination of shared environmental conditions among sites and the movements of individuals between sites. Untangling the drivers of population synchrony requires investigation of how populations are correlated across space and time in relation to climate and mobility-related attributes. Here, we use species survey data from over four decades to investigate average levels and temporal trends in population synchrony for 58 British bird and butterfly species. We first show that population synchrony is significantly associated with synchrony in seasonal climatic variables. After accounting for spatiotemporal climatic patterns, we determine whether temporal trends in population synchrony are shaped by mobility-related attributes. We test this through an interspecies comparison using three variables correlated with mobility: biotope specialism, estimated species mobility, and local abundance change, which is known to affect emigration rate. We find that temporal trends in population synchrony are most marked for generalist butterfly species, butterflies with high estimated mobility, and butterflies that had changed in their mean abundance. For birds, we find changes in population synchrony are associated with specialist bird species and those that increased in abundance over time. Our results reveal a widespread effect of mobility attributes and abundance patterns on population synchrony over time, suggesting that variation in dispersal is a key factor determining the extent to which population dynamics are synchronised.
Date Issued
2025-05-01
Date Acceptance
2025-05-02
Citation
Ecology and Evolution, 2025, 15 (5)
ISSN
2045-7758
Publisher
Wiley
Journal / Book Title
Ecology and Evolution
Volume
15
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
© 2025 The Author(s). Ecology and Evolution published by British Ecological Society and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
10.1002/ece3.71443
Subjects
dispersal
long-term monitoring data
Moran effect
population synchrony
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
e71443
Date Publish Online
2025-05-26