Abstract
Environmental variation in time and space affects biological processes such as extinction risk and speed of adaptation to environmental change. The spatial structure of environmental variation may vary among ecosystems, for instance due to differences in the flow of nutrients, genes and individuals. However, inferences about ecosystem spatial scale should also include spatial autocorrelation in environmental stochasticity, such as fluctuations in weather or climate. We used spatially structured time series (19-36 yr) on temperature from 4 different ecosystems (terrestrial, limnic, coastal sea and open ocean) to assess the spatiotemporal patterns of environmental variation over large geographical scales (up to 1900 km) during summer and winter. The distance of positive spatial autocorrelation in mean temperature was greatest for the terrestrial system (range: 592-622 km), and shorter for the open ocean (range: 472-414 km), coastal sea (range: 155-814 km) and the limnic systems (range: 51-324 km), suggesting a stronger spatial structure in environmental variation in the terrestrial system. The terrestrial system had high spatial synchrony in temperature (mean correlation: winter = 0.82, summer = 0.66) with a great spatial scaling (>650 km). Consequently, populations of terrestrial species experience similar environmental fluctuations even at distances up to 1000 km, compared to species in the aquatic systems (<500 km). There were clear seasonal differences in environmental synchrony in the terrestrial and limnic systems, but less so in the other systems. Our results suggest that biological processes affected by environmental stochasticity occur at the largest spatial scale in terrestrial systems, but their magnitude depends on whether the process is affected by winter or summer conditions.
Highlights
Environmental variation in time and space is the main driver affecting processes of ecological and evolutionary change, including population dynamics, ecosystem change, evolution and speciation
This is true in the face of the increasing human impact on ecosystems where the need for management and conservation actions at appropriate spatial scales is challenged by decreasing access to natural habitats (Moore et al 2010, Knapp et al 2017, Brennan et al 2019)
The correlation between the scaling of the spatial autocorrelation and the pattern of synchrony was Ecosystems worldwide and in all biomes face challenges related to human activity (IPBES 2019)
Summary
Environmental variation in time and space is the main driver affecting processes of ecological and evolutionary change, including population dynamics, ecosystem change, evolution and speciation. The recognition that open aquatic systems have a higher potential for dispersal and migration, and flow of nutrients or other components, than most terrestrial systems (Myers et al 1997, Carr et al 2003), has led to the perception that ‘blue’ marine systems have a greater temporal and spatial scaling of biological patterns and processes than ‘green’ terrestrial systems (Mayr 1954, Steele 1991, Carr et al 2003, Vasseur & Yodzis 2004) These intrinsic physical factors are unquestionably important for processes affecting both population dynamics and gene flow. A thorough evaluation of spatial structure of such environmental stochasticity across systems is rarely done in comparative studies (Hansen et al 2020)
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