Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SEASON (Species persistence in changing seasonal environments: A new holistic framework integrating demography and biotic interactions)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2020-07-01 al 2022-06-30
The main aim of the MSCA project SEASON was to derive general principles of how feedbacks between demography and biotic interactions mediate species persistence and community dynamics under changes in the seasonality of environmental factors. To achieve this aim, SEASON consisted of two objectives:
Objective 1: Develop a unified framework of species interactions under seasonality change – advance theoretical ecology through simulations and projections of multiple demography-biotic-interaction feedbacks
Objective 2: Synthesize empirical patterns of species interactions under seasonality change – improve biodiversity conservation by evaluating/refining framework on empirical data to guide assessment of feedbacks
Parallel to the development of theoretical simulations, SEASON had a strong empirical component, where I used multi-species demographic and abundance data from four systems to develop mechanistic multispecies forecasts of seasonal climate-change effects. These empirical study cases supported predictions from the theoretical simulations and produced evidence that accounting for seasonal biotic interactions is key in forecasting population dynamics. I used the results from the empirical studies to develop a guide for future biodiversity research highlighting that ecological forecasting must assess how changes in abiotic factors (such as climate) affects species’ demographic rates directly or indirectly by altering species interactions. A key output of the empirical analyses has also been to demonstrate how demographic models can be parameterized and projected from abundance data for data-limited systems – which promises a broader applications of mechanistic forecasting approaches that account for demography-biotic-interactions feedbacks.
Outputs from the theoretical and empirical analyses have been published or submitted to scientific journals. Publications are accompanied by press releases, and project updates, including communication activities, are published on the project website and on social media. I also presented the simulations and empirical applications at three international conferences and have used them extensively as teaching material.
Freely available demographic multispecies models that can be used to forecast the effect of seasonality change on communities are currently not available; and the simulations I developed in SEASON are an important step towards creating easily applicable tools to understand the demographic mechanisms that allow populations and communities respond to a key aspect of global change. The results of SEASON can be exploited by researchers and practitioners to assess how seasonal individual, age- or stage-specific demographic responses to biotic and abiotic drivers for several species in a community affect fates of populations and communities under environmental change.