Coupled dynamics of body mass and population growth in response to environmental change

By A. Ozgul, D. Childs, M. Oli, K. Armitage, Daniel T. Blumstein, L. Olson, S. Tuljapurkar, T. Coulson. Nature, 2010

626 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Environmental change has altered the phenology, morphological traits and population dynamics of many species. However, the links underlying these joint responses remain largely unknown owing to a paucity of long-term data and the lack of an appropriate analytical framework. Here we investigate the link between phenotypic and demographic responses to environmental change using a new methodology and a long-term (1976–2008) data set from a hibernating mammal (the yellow-bellied marmot) inhabiting a dynamic subalpine habitat. We demonstrate how earlier emergence from hibernation and earlier weaning of young has led to a longer growing season and larger body masses before hibernation. The resulting shift in both the phenotype and the relationship between phenotype and fitness components led to a decline in adult mortality, which in turn triggered an abrupt increase in population size in recent years. Direct and trait-mediated effects of environmental change made comparable contributions to the observed marked increase in population growth. Our results help explain how a shift in phenology can cause simultaneous phenotypic and demographic changes, and highlight the need for a theory integrating ecological and evolutionary dynamics in stochastic environments.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/363eb274f74c9a8a90e53a4cd27e5d9f860447ec

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Citations in the corpus

Phenotypic plasticity and evolutionary demographic responses to climate change: taking theory out to the field (2013, background): “…that demographic models do gain explanatory power by including information on phenotypes, implying that rapid phenotypic change significantly affects population growth in the short term (Hairston et al. 2005; Pelletier et al. 2007, 2012; Ezard, Cote & Pelletier 2009; Ozgul et al. 2010, 2012).”
Identifying the World's Most Climate Change Vulnerable Species: A Systematic Trait-Based Assessment of all Birds, Amphibians and Corals (2013, background): “This is simply going to be impossible for many species, but the availability of a few such studies [11,85,87] and the deployment of more mechanistic models (e.”
The broad footprint of climate change from genes to biomes to people (2016, background): “In general, decreasing body size with warming is expected, but evidence from cold, highaltitude habitats suggests that increased primary productivity and longer growing seasons from warming have led to increased body size in some mammal species such as American marten (Martes americana) and yellow-b”
Effects of climate change and fisheries bycatch on Southern Ocean seabirds : a review (2012, positive): “…variables (Mysterud et al. 2001, Gimenez & Barbraud 2009), density dependence (Frederiksen et al. 2001, Lima et al. 2002), synergistic effects with other environmental factors (Brook et al. 2008), or microevolutionary changes (Kinnison & Hairston 2007, Coulson et al. 2010, Ozgul et al. 2010).”
Managing for change: wetland transitions under sea‐level rise and outcomes for threatened species (2011, background): “Coupled demographic–SLR models represent a novel contribution and complement the recent proliferation of demographic-range models with climate parameters (for example Keith et al., 2008; Ozgul et al., 2010).”
Analysing eco‐evolutionary dynamics—The challenging complexity of the real world (2019, background): “…published on a number of unique datasets on trait values and population dynamics of mammals to show that evolutionary trait change impacts population dynamics in the field (Ozgul et al., 2010; Pelletier, Clutton-Brock, Pemberton, Tuljapurkar, & Coulson, 2007; Pelletier, Garant, & Hendry, 2009).”