Ranking species based on sensitivity to perturbations under non‐equilibrium community dynamics
Name
Ecology Letters - 2022 - Medeiros - Ranking species based on sensitivity to perturbations under non‐equilibrium community.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.07 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2cfc95b80887a306cf6c862979dc55d6
Author(s)
Medeiros, Lucas P
Allesina, Stefano
Dakos, Vasilis
Sugihara, George
Saavedra, Serguei
Date Issued
January 2023
Journal
Ecology Letters
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Medeiros, Lucas P, Allesina, Stefano, Dakos, Vasilis, Sugihara, George and Saavedra, Serguei. 2023. "Ranking species based on sensitivity to perturbations under non‐equilibrium community dynamics." Ecology Letters, 26 (1).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Managing ecological communities requires fast detection of species that are sensitive to perturbations. Yet, the focus on recovery to equilibrium has prevented us from assessing species responses to perturbations when abundances fluctuate over time. Here, we introduce two data-driven approaches (expected sensitivity and eigenvector rankings) based on the time-varying Jacobian matrix to rank species over time according to their sensitivity to perturbations on abundances. Using several population dynamics models, we demonstrate that we can infer these rankings from time-series data to predict the order of species sensitivities. We find that the most sensitive species are not always the ones with the most rapidly changing or lowest abundance, which are typical criteria used to monitor populations. Finally, using two empirical time series, we show that sensitive species tend to be harder to forecast. Our results suggest that incorporating information on species interactions can improve how we manage communities out of equilibrium.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14131
