Abstract
AbstractOur knowledge of ecological stability is built on assumptions of scale. These assumptions limit our ability to reach a generalizable and mechanistic understanding of stability under global environmental change. Moving towards a multiscale approach—across space, time and environment—will allow us to better understand the intrinsic (e.g., demographic) and extrinsic (environmental) drivers of ecological stability. In this perspective, we review multiple sources of variation responsible for shaping ecological dynamics, and how scale affects our observation of these dynamics through its confounding effect on drivers of variation in ecosystems. We discuss the effect of temporal scale when combining empirical dynamic modeling with high‐resolution population time series to consider the time‐varying nature of multispecies interaction networks, highlighting interspecific interactions as an intrinsic driver of community dynamics. Next, we examine energy landscape analysis as a method for inferring stability and transience during community assembly and its interaction with spatial scale, emphasizing the intrinsic role of compositional variability in assembly dynamics. We then examine population dynamics at species' range margins and show how considering the interaction between spatial and temporal environmental heterogeneity, an extrinsic driver of population dynamics, can facilitate a nuanced understanding of population expansions, range shifts, and species invasions. Finally, we discuss broadly how the sources of intrinsic and extrinsic variation interact with each other and with spatiotemporal scale to shape ecological dynamics. Better recognition of the scale‐dependent nature of the relationship between drivers of variation and ecological dynamics will be invaluable to illuminate the dynamics influencing ecological stability across scales.
Highlights
We describe conditions under which spatial or temporal scale may influence our understanding of various intrinsic and extrinsic drivers (Table 1) of ecological dynamics, and some methodological considerations using recent case-studies at different levels of ecological organization
We describe methods by focusing on the main source(s) of variability being imposed on ecological communities, which often depend on spatiotemporal scale
Thinking about the composition of ecological communities rather than interspecific interactions therein, spatial scale is a key driver of compositional variability and the intrinsic dynamics and stability of community assembly
Summary
The dominant processes shaping population or community dynamics depend explicitly on the spatial scale considered and on environmental context, including the temporal signal of environmental conditions (Pinek et al, 2020; Villa Martín et al, 2019; Zelnik et al, 2018). We describe conditions under which spatial or temporal scale may influence our understanding of various intrinsic (interaction variability, compositional variability) and extrinsic (environmental variability) drivers (Table 1) of ecological dynamics, and some methodological considerations using recent case-studies at different levels of ecological organization.
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