Understanding the population consequences of disturbance
Abstract
Managing the nonlethal effects of disturbance on wildlife populations has been a long-term goal for decision makers, managers, and ecologists, and assessment of these effects is currently required by European Union and United States legislation. However, robust assessment of these effects is challenging. The management of human activities that have nonlethal effects on wildlife is a specific example of a fundamental ecological problem: how to understand the population-level consequences of changes in the behavior or physiology of individual animals that are caused by external stressors. In this study, we review recent applications of a conceptual framework for assessing and predicting these consequences for marine mammal populations. We explore the range of models that can be used to formalize the approach and we identify critical research gaps. We also provide a decision tree that can be used to select the most appropriate model structure given the available data. Synthesis and applications: The implementation of this framework has moved the focus of discussion of the management of nonlethal disturbances on marine mammal populations away from a rhetorical debate about defining negligible impact and toward a quantitative understanding of long-term population-level effects. Here we demonstrate the framework's general applicability to other marine and terrestrial systems and show how it can support integrated modeling of the proximate and ultimate mechanisms that regulate trait-mediated, indirect interactions in ecological communities, that is, the nonconsumptive effects of a predator or stressor on a species' behavior, physiology, or life history.
Citation
Pirotta , E , Booth , C G , Costa , D P , Fleishman , E , Kraus , S D , Lusseau , D , Moretti , D , New , L F , Schick , R S , Schwarz , L K , Simmons , S E , Thomas , L , Tyack , P L , Weise , M J , Wells , R S & Harwood , J 2018 , ' Understanding the population consequences of disturbance ' , Ecology and Evolution , vol. Early View . https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4458
Publication
Ecology and Evolution
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2045-7758Type
Journal item
Rights
© 2018 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
This review was supported by Office of Naval Research grant N00014‐16‐1‐2858: “PCoD+: Developing widely‐applicable models of the population consequences of disturbance.” PLT and DL acknowledge support from the MASTS pooling initiative (Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland; supported by the Scottish Funding Council, grant reference HR09011, and contributing institutions) and PLT acknowledges support from ONR grant N00014‐15‐1‐2553.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.