Abstract
Climatic conditions, trophic links between species and dispersal may induce spatial synchrony in population fluctuations. Spatial synchrony increases the extinction risk of populations and, thus, it is important to understand how synchrony-inducing mechanisms affect populations already threatened by habitat loss and climate change. For many species, it is unclear how population fluctuations vary over time and space, and what factors potentially drive this variation. In this study, we focus on factors determining population fluctuations and spatial synchrony in the Siberian flying squirrel, Pteromys volans, using long-term monitoring data from 16 Finnish populations located 2–400 km apart. We found an indication of synchronous population dynamics on a large scale in flying squirrels. However, the synchrony was not found to be clearly related to distance between study sites because the populations seemed to be strongly affected by small-scale local factors. The regularity of population fluctuations varied over time. The fluctuations were linked to changes in winter precipitation, which has previously been linked to the reproductive success of flying squirrels. Food abundance (tree mast) and predator abundance were not related to population fluctuations in this study. We conclude that spatial synchrony was not unequivocally related to distance in flying squirrels, as has been observed in earlier studies for more abundant rodent species. Our study also emphasises the role of climate in population fluctuations and the synchrony of the species.
Highlights
Fluctuations in population densities may be spatially correlated due to climatic conditions, trophic links between species and dispersal (Moran 1953; Liebhold et al 2004)
We analysed the effects of weather, tree mast and predators simultaneously on flying squirrel population fluctuations, and only precipitation in winter (yeart−1) was clearly linked
The estimated 95% confidence intervals (CI) of the average synchrony are based on 5000 bootstrap permutations; the estimates of statistical significance of the general additive models (GAM) (p) are based on comparisons of the empirical adjusted r2 values with 5000 randomly permuted 0-models to flying squirrel population growth rates
Summary
Fluctuations in population densities may be spatially correlated due to climatic conditions, trophic links between species and dispersal (Moran 1953; Liebhold et al 2004). Such spatial synchrony is observed in a wide variety of organisms across distances of up to several hundred kilometres (Moran 1953; Hanski and Woiwod 1993; Sinclair et al 1993; Ranta et al 1995; Paradis et al 2000). Variations in weather are commonly implicated as a mechanism causing spatial synchrony in population fluctuations (Moran 1953; Hanski and Woiwod 1993; Lindström et al 1996; Paradis et al 2000).
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