Spatial Scales of Population Synchrony generally increases as fluctuations propagate in a Two Species Ecosystem

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that in a two-species ecosystem, the spatial scale of population synchrony typically increases with the propagation of fluctuations, highlighting the importance of ecosystem-level analysis for conservation and management.

Contribution

The paper provides analytical evidence that population synchrony scales generally increase with fluctuation propagation in two-species ecosystems, extending previous single-species and theoretical findings.

Findings

Synchrony scale increases with fluctuation propagation.

Exceptions occur when one species heavily depends on the other for damping fluctuations.

Ecosystem perspective is crucial for sustainable management and extinction risk assessment.

Abstract

The spatial scale of population synchrony gives the characteristic distance at which the population fluctuations are correlated. Therefore, it gives also the characteristic size of the regions of simultaneous population depletion, or even extinction. Single-species previous results imply that the spatial scale of population synchrony is equal or greater (due to dispersion) than the spatial scale of synchrony of environmental fluctuations. Theoretical results on multispecies ecosystems points that interspecies interactions modify the spatial scale of population synchrony. In particular, recent results on two species ecosystems, for two competitors and for predator-prey, point that the spatial scale of population synchrony generally increases as the fluctuations propagates through the food web, i.e., the species more directly affected by environmental fluctuations presents the smaller spatial scale of population synchrony. Here, we found that this behaviour is generally true for a two species ecosystem. The exception to this behaviour are the particular cases where the population fluctuations of one of the species does not damp by its own, but requires a strong transfer of the fluctuation to the other species to be damped. These analytical results illustrate the importance of applying an ecosystem rather than a single-species perspective when developing sustainable harvestings or assessing the extinction risk of endangered species.