Consequences of correlations between habitat modifications and negative impact of climate change for regional species survival

Abstract While several empirical and theoretical studies have clearly shown the negative effects of climate or landscape changes on population and species survival only few of them addressed combined and correlated consequences of these key environmental drivers. This also includes positive landscape changes such as active habitat management and restoration to buffer the negative effects of deteriorating climatic conditions. In this study, we apply a conceptual spatial modelling approach based on functional types to explore the effects of both positive and negative correlations between changes in habitat and climate conditions on the survival of spatially structured populations. We test the effect of different climate and landscape change scenarios on four different functional types that represent a broad spectrum of species characterised by their landscape level carrying capacity, the local population turnover rates at the patch level (K-strategies vs. r-strategies) and dispersal characterstics. As expected, simulation results show that correlated landscape and climatic changes can accelerate (in case of habitat loss or degradation) or slow down (in case of habitat gain or improvement) regional species extinction. However, the strength of the combined changes depends on local turnover at the patch level, the overall landscape capacity of the species, and its specific dispersal characteristics. Under all scenarios of correlated changes in habitat and climate conditions we found the highest sensitivity for functional types representing species with a low landscape capacity but a high population growth rate and a strong density regulation causing a high turnover at the local patch level. The relative importance of habitat loss or habitat degradation, in combination with climate deterioration, differed among the functional types. However, an increase in regional capacity revealed a similar response pattern: For all types, habitat improvement led to higher survival times than habitat gain, i.e. the establishment of new habitat patches. This suggests that improving local habitat quality at a regional scale is a more promising conservation strategy under climate change than implementing new habitat patches. This conceptual modelling study provides a general framework to better understand and support the management of populations prone to complex environmental changes.

[1]  J. Maynard Smith,et al.  The Stability of Predator‐Prey Systems , 1973 .

[2]  R. Holt,et al.  A Survey and Overview of Habitat Fragmentation Experiments , 2000 .

[3]  William W. Hargrove,et al.  A Fractal Landscape Realizer for Generating Synthetic Maps , 2002 .

[4]  Samuel A. Cushman,et al.  Effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on amphibians: A review and prospectus , 2006 .

[5]  V. Grimm,et al.  Animal species diversity driven by habitat heterogeneity/diversity: the importance of keystone structures , 2004 .

[6]  J. K. Hill,et al.  Rapid responses of British butterflies to opposing forces of climate and habitat change , 2001, Nature.

[7]  M. Sykes,et al.  Climate change threats to plant diversity in Europe. , 2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[8]  B. Dickson,et al.  Biodiversity and climate change in relation to the Natura 2000 network , 2009 .

[9]  C. Wissel,et al.  Species Survival in Fragmented Landscapes: Where are We Now? , 2004, Biodiversity & Conservation.

[10]  Kirk A. Moloney,et al.  The Effects of Disturbance Architecture on Landscape-Level Population Dynamics , 1996 .

[11]  M. Betts,et al.  Independent effects of fragmentation on forest songbirds: an organism-based approach. , 2006, Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America.

[12]  S. Ormerod,et al.  Meeting the ecological challenges of agricultural change: editors' introduction , 2003 .

[13]  Otso Ovaskainen,et al.  The metapopulation capacity of a fragmented landscape , 2000, Nature.

[14]  R. Hobbs,et al.  Ecological Restoration and Global Climate Change , 2006 .

[15]  Ludek Berec,et al.  Multiple Allee effects and population management. , 2007, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[16]  M. Drechsler,et al.  Are spatially correlated or uncorrelated disturbance regimes better for the survival of species , 2003 .

[17]  A. King,et al.  The effect of landscape structure on community self-organization and critical biodiversity , 2004 .

[18]  Damien A. Fordham,et al.  Dynamics of range margins for metapopulations under climate change , 2009, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[19]  Philip E. Hulme,et al.  Adapting to climate change: is there scope for ecological management in the face of a global threat? , 2005 .

[20]  D. Lindenmayer,et al.  Landscape modification and habitat fragmentation: a synthesis , 2007 .

[21]  D. Wascher,et al.  Climate change meets habitat fragmentation: linking landscape and biogeographical scale levels in research and conservation , 2004 .

[22]  A. Hoffmann,et al.  Limits to the adaptive potential of small populations , 2006 .

[23]  P. Adam.  Going with the flow? Threatened species management and legislation in the face of climate change. , 2009 .

[24]  S. Lavorel,et al.  Predicting changes in community composition and ecosystem functioning from plant traits: revisiting the Holy Grail , 2002 .

[25]  Matthias C. Wichmann,et al.  Short-term transformation of matrix into hospitable habitat facilitates gene flow and mitigates fragmentation. , 2007, The Journal of animal ecology.

[26]  K. Johst,et al.  Compensatory versus over-compensatory density regulation: Implications for metapopulation persistence in dynamic landscapes , 2006 .

[27]  D. Richardson,et al.  Potential impacts of future land use and climate change on the Red List status of the Proteaceae in the Cape Floristic Region, South Africa , 2005 .

[28]  Ian Stirling,et al.  Quantifying the sensitivity of Arctic marine mammals to climate-induced habitat change. , 2008, Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America.

[29]  O. Phillips,et al.  Extinction risk from climate change , 2004, Nature.

[30]  T. Tscharntke,et al.  Population size and the risk of local extinction: empirical evidence from rare plants , 2004 .

[31]  S. Engen,et al.  Population dynamical consequences of climate change for a small temperate songbird. , 2000, Science.

[32]  Christian Wissel,et al.  The intrinsic mean time to extinction: a unifying approach to analysing persistence and viability of populations , 2004 .

[33]  D. Roy,et al.  Butterfly numbers and weather: predicting historical trends in abundance and the future effects of climate change , 2001 .

[34]  Florian Jeltsch,et al.  Detecting general plant functional type responses in fragmented landscapes using spatially-explicit simulations , 2008 .

[35]  Lenore Fahrig,et al.  EFFECT OF HABITAT FRAGMENTATION ON THE EXTINCTION THRESHOLD: A SYNTHESIS* , 2002 .

[36]  P. Lundberg,et al.  From climate change to population change: the need to consider annual life cycles , 2006 .

[37]  L. Fahrig.  Effects of Habitat Fragmentation on Biodiversity , 2003 .

[38]  D. Saupe.  Algorithms for random fractals , 1988 .

[39]  R. Didham,et al.  Confounding factors in the detection of species responses to habitat fragmentation , 2005, Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society.

[40]  C. Dormann,et al.  Static species distribution models in dynamically changing systems: how good can predictions really be? , 2009 .

[41]  J. K. Hill,et al.  Responses of butterflies to twentieth century climate warming: implications for future ranges , 2002, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[42]  Karin Johst,et al.  Metapopulation persistence in dynamic landscapes: the role of dispersal distance , 2002 .

[43]  Karin Johst,et al.  Does Red Noise Increase or Decrease Extinction Risk? Single Extreme Events versus Series of Unfavorable Conditions , 2006, The American Naturalist.

[44]  E. Bruna,et al.  DEMOGRAPHIC EFFECTS OF HABITAT FRAGMENTATION ON A TROPICAL HERB: LIFE‐TABLE RESPONSE EXPERIMENTS , 2005 .

[45]  T. Dawson,et al.  Modelling species distributions in Britain: a hierarchical integration of climate and land-cover data , 2004 .

[46]  M. Caley,et al.  SEPARATING ECOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF HABITAT FRAGMENTATION, DEGRADATION, AND LOSS ON CORAL COMMENSALS , 2001 .

[47]  M. Mönkkönen,et al.  HABITAT LOSS AND FRAGMENTATION IN DYNAMIC LANDSCAPES: AVIAN PERSPECTIVES FROM THE BOREAL FOREST* , 2002 .

[48]  Wilfried Thuiller,et al.  Predicting extinction risks under climate change: coupling stochastic population models with dynamic bioclimatic habitat models , 2008, Biology Letters.

[49]  Heinz-Otto Peitgen,et al.  The science of fractal images , 2011 .

[50]  T. Dawson,et al.  Long-distance plant dispersal and habitat fragmentation: identifying conservation targets for spatial landscape planning under climate change , 2005 .

[51]  Brendan A. Wintle,et al.  Climate change, connectivity and conservation decision making: back to basics , 2009 .

[52]  J. Travis.  Climate change and habitat destruction: a deadly anthropogenic cocktail , 2003, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[53]  Virginia H. Dale,et al.  THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LAND‐USE CHANGE AND CLIMATE CHANGE , 1997 .

[54]  F. Woodward,et al.  Conservation of Biodiversity in a Changing Climate , 2002, Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology.

[55]  Florian Jeltsch,et al.  Linking a population model with an ecosystem model: Assessing the impact of land use and climate change on savanna shrub cover dynamics , 2006 .

[56]  Bernd Blasius,et al.  Extinction risk, coloured noise and the scaling of variance. , 2005, Theoretical population biology.

[57]  C. Margules,et al.  Predictors of Species Sensitivity to Fragmentation , 2004, Biodiversity & Conservation.

[58]  Monika Schwager,et al.  The state of plant population modelling in light of environmental change , 2008 .

[59]  Paul F. Donald,et al.  Habitat connectivity and matrix restoration: the wider implications of agri‐environment schemes , 2006 .

[60]  Karin Johst,et al.  Which species will succesfully track climate change? The influence of intraspecific competition and density dependent dispersal on range shifting dynamics , 2007 .

[61]  T. Bellows.  The Descriptive Properties of Some Models for Density Dependence , 1981 .

[62]  Hong S. He,et al.  Integrating Landscape and Metapopulation Modeling Approaches: Viability of the Sharp‐Tailed Grouse in a Dynamic Landscape , 2004 .

[63]  T. Herben,et al.  POPULATION VIABILITY AND REINTRODUCTION STRATEGIES: A SPATIALLY EXPLICIT LANDSCAPE-LEVEL APPROACH , 2005 .

[64]  O. Hoegh‐Guldberg,et al.  Ecological responses to recent climate change , 2002, Nature.