The dynamics of natural populations under global warming

Marlène Gamelon – Laboratoire de Biomètrie et Biologie Évolutive (LBBE) & CNRS – Université Lyon, France)

Natural populations live in an environment that is rapidly warming. Alongside the changes in mean values, temporal variation in temperature also increases. Understanding species’ response to climate warming is crucial. However, this is a challenging task. From the long-term monitoring of natural populations of birds and mammals, Marlène illustrates and discusses how climate warming influences the dynamics of natural populations through several pathways. Warmer conditions can induce changes in the frequency and temporal autocorrelation of food production and thus indirectly impact population dynamics. Climate warming can also interact with other environmental factors such as harvesting, possibly amplifying environmentally-induced population fluctuations and increasing extinction risk. Finally, the signal of climate warming can be detected at different levels of biological organization, from traits, to vital rate and population growth rate, at very different points in time. This could lead to amplified climate change signal at the population level, with important implications for wildlife conservation and management.