Abstract
Despite its significance regarding the conservation and management of biological resources, the body of theory predicting that the correlation between successive environmental states can profoundly influence extinction has not been empirically validated. Identical clonal populations from a model experimental system based on the collembolan Folsomia candida were used in the present study to investigate the effect of environmental autocorrelation on time to extinction. Environmental variation was imposed by variable implementation (present/absent) of a culling procedure according to treatments that represented six patterns of environmental autocorrelation. The average number of culling events was held constant across treatments but, as environmental autocorrelation increased, longer runs of both favourable and unfavourable culling tended to occur. While no difference was found among the survival functions for the various treatments, the time taken for 50% of the component populations to become extinct decreased significantly with increasing environmental autocorrelation. Similarly, analysis of all extinct populations demonstrated that time to extinction was shortened as environmental autocorrelation increased. However, this acceleration of extinction can be fully offset if sequential introduction is used in place of simultaneous introduction when founding the populations.
Full Text
The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (120.7 KB).
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Cohen J. E. Unexpected dominance of high frequencies in chaotic nonlinear population models. Nature. 1995 Dec 7;378(6557):610–612. doi: 10.1038/378610a0. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Haccou P., Iwasa Y. Establishment probability in fluctuating environments: a branching process model. Theor Popul Biol. 1996 Dec;50(3):254–280. doi: 10.1006/tpbi.1996.0031. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Haccou Patsy, Vatutin Vladimir. Establishment success and extinction risk in autocorrelated environments. Theor Popul Biol. 2003 Nov;64(3):303–314. doi: 10.1016/s0040-5809(03)00092-3. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Halley J. M., Kunin W. E. Extinction risk and the 1/f family of noise models. Theor Popul Biol. 1999 Dec;56(3):215–230. doi: 10.1006/tpbi.1999.1424. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Holt Robert D., Barfield Michael, Gonzalez Andrew. Impacts of environmental variability in open populations and communities: "inflation" in sink environments. Theor Popul Biol. 2003 Nov;64(3):315–330. doi: 10.1016/s0040-5809(03)00087-x. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Johst K., Wissel C. Extinction risk in a temporally correlated fluctuating environment. Theor Popul Biol. 1997 Oct;52(2):91–100. doi: 10.1006/tpbi.1997.1322. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Lande R., Orzack S. H. Extinction dynamics of age-structured populations in a fluctuating environment. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1988 Oct;85(19):7418–7421. doi: 10.1073/pnas.85.19.7418. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Leigh E. G., Jr The average lifetime of a population in a varying environment. J Theor Biol. 1981 May 21;90(2):213–239. doi: 10.1016/0022-5193(81)90044-8. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- doi: 10.1098/rspb.1997.0254. [DOI] [PMC free article] [Google Scholar]
- Petchey O. L. Environmental colour affects aspects of single-species population dynamics. Proc Biol Sci. 2000 Apr 22;267(1445):747–754. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2000.1066. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]