Most species show seasonal variation in survival and reproduction, which determines and is affected by biotic (intra- and interspecific) interactions. Such demography-biotic-interaction feedbacks, in turn, mediate community responses to seasonal patterns in environmental factors. Changing these seasonal patterns, which then results in adverse effects on the demography of interacting species, is one important way in which global environmental change alters biodiversity. However, as population and community responses to changes in seasonality are typically studied separately, we lack a mechanistic understanding of the processes that threaten the persistence of interacting species, posing a major challenge to biodiversity conservation. Robustly capturing some of the pathways through which global change affects populations may allow us to design robust alternative forecasting scenarios of outcomes under global change.
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
