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Dryad

Landscape structure affects metapopulation-scale tipping points

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Jan 02, 2023 version files 153.26 MB

Abstract

Even when environments deteriorate gradually, ecosystems may shift abruptly from one state to another. Such catastrophic shifts are difficult to predict and sometimes to reverse (so-called hysteresis). While well studied in simplified contexts, we lack a general understanding of how catastrophic shifts spread in realistically spatially structured landscapes. For different types of landscape structures, including typical terrestrial modular and riverine dendritic networks, we here investigate landscape-scale stability in metapopulations whose patches can locally exhibit catastrophic shifts. We find that such metapopulations usually exhibit large-scale catastrophic shifts and hysteresis and that the properties of these shifts depend strongly on the metapopulation spatial structure and on the population dispersal rate: an intermediate dispersal rate, a low average degree or a riverine spatial structure can largely reduce hysteresis size. Our study suggests that large-scale restoration is easier with spatially clustered restoration efforts and in populations characterized by an intermediate dispersal rate.