Assessing the Influence of Temporal Autocorrelations on the Population Dynamics of a Disturbance Specialist Plant Population in a Random Environment.

Assessing the Influence of Temporal Autocorrelations on the Population Dynamics of a Disturbance Specialist Plant Population in a Random Environment. Am Nat. 2017 Oct;190(4):570-583 Authors: Eager EA, Pilson D, Alexander HM, Tenhumberg B Abstract Biological populations are strongly influenced by random variations in their environment, which are often autocorrelated in time. For disturbance specialist plant populations, the frequency and intensity of environmental stochasticity (via disturbances) can drive the qualitative nature of their population dynamics. In this article, we extended our earlier model to explore the effect of temporally autocorrelated disturbances on population persistence. In our earlier work, we only assumed disturbances were independent and identically distributed in time. We proved that the plant seed bank population converges in distribution, and we showed that the mean and variance in seed bank population size were both increasing functions of the autocorrelation coefficient for all parameter values considered, but the interplay between increasing population size and increasing variability caused interesting relationships between quasi-extinction probability and autocorrelation. For example, for populations with low seed survival, fecundity, and disturbance frequency, increasingly positive autocorrelated disturbances decreased quasi-extinction probability. Higher disturbance frequency coupled with low seed su...
Source: The American Naturalist - Category: Biology Authors: Tags: Am Nat Source Type: research