Using stochastic population process models to predict the impact of climate change

Abstract

More than ten years ago a paper was published in which stochastic population process models were fitted to time series of two marine polychaete species in the western Wadden Sea, The Netherlands (Van der Meer et al., 2000). For the predator species, model fits pointed to a strong effect of average sea surface winter temperature on the population dynamics, and one-year ahead model forecasts correlated well with true observations (r=0.90). During the last decade a pronounced warming of the area occurred. Average winter temperature increased with 0.9°C. Here we show that despite the high goodness-of-fit whilst using the original dataset, predictive capability of the models for the recent warm period was poor.