Predictive ecology needs dynamic life cycle analyses integrated in time and space

Maria Paniw – Spanish National Research Council

Population fitness is a key concept in ecology. It describes how natural populations of interacting species may fare under environmental change – including how they can adapt or change their ecological niches in communities to avoid extinction. To maximize their fitness under change, population have evolved life-history strategies, or differential investment in survival and reproduction across the life cycle. The interplay of survival and reproduction is often dynamic and involves numerous feedbacks and tradeoffs. In this talk, I will use examples from plants and animals, scaling from individuals to communities, to argue that we need an integrated look at the demographic drivers of population fitness to robustly forecast biodiversity change. Extrapolating abundance changes by looking at survival vs. reproduction in isolation, without consider their integration in life-cycle analyses, may provide a biased view when tradeoffs or cascading effects are present. I will also argue that integrating the drivers of population fitness into forecasts can provide an efficient way to develop realistic dynamic forecasts under data limitations plaguing most ecological analyses.