Space sculpts time: Metacommunity risk and resilience
Climate extremes and rapid urbanization drive ecological stress, resulting in systemic risk that threatens ecosystems. Questions arise about the future states of ecosystems and how we as a society can potentially manage their evolution in the face of natural variability and human needs. To this end,...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Elsevier
2025-09-01
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| Series: | Ecological Indicators |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X25007496 |
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| Summary: | Climate extremes and rapid urbanization drive ecological stress, resulting in systemic risk that threatens ecosystems. Questions arise about the future states of ecosystems and how we as a society can potentially manage their evolution in the face of natural variability and human needs. To this end, models that reliably predict ecosystem risk patterns across multiscale features are needed to guide precise ecosystem design. Here we propose the metacommunity risk as the inverse of the product of the species persistence time (SPT), its average probability, and the species average geographic range. Also, the spatial resilience index (SRI) is introduced as the ratio of metacommunity risks in the disturbed and undisturbed scenarios; SRI is calculated to identify the most resilient communities with the highest species persistence and geographic range.As a key Earth’s ecoclimatic region, we reproduce biodiversity patterns of the Amazonian MAP (Madre de Dios - Acre - Pando) tropical rainforest affected by the construction of a transoceanic highway and climate change, with a neutral metacommunity model at different scales and resolutions. The influence of systemic environmental variability – as diffused drought and localized road-driven habitat change – on species loss increases with spatial scale and decreases with tree clustering heterogeneity. At the ecosystem scale, drought sensitivity is 37% higher than at the plot scale, where the difference in scales is seven orders of magnitude. Conversely, the anthropogenic disturbance played by the road is much larger at the plot scale and undetectable at the ecosystem scale due to its limited impact on systemic dispersal. We predict a loss of species richness of 10, 3, and 1% per 104 m2 in the drought scenario where 65% variation in mean annual precipitation occurs for forest plots with homogeneous random and heterogeneous scale-free species clustering. This loss is 54, 21, and 11 % in the localized risk scenario where the road cuts the forest plots in half. Thus, heterogeneous tree clustering enhances species richness and resilience of forest plots to natural and human stressors. Low and high bimodal distributions of clustering were found for highly stable species richness and persistence. SPT was inferred as a power-law function whose exponent, and yet the risk, increases with the magnitude of system disturbance. The power-law distribution is invariant if the tree cover distribution is stable, manifesting higher resilience despite changes in the shape of species richness due to systemic risk.Our results show that societal development should consider ecosystem tree distributions to maximize biodiversity organization and persistence as a cascading outcome. SRI can be used to map vulnerability and plan ecosystem transformations that preserve connected communities responsible for shaping critical biodiversity. These results demonstrate the importance of a parsimonious neutral metacommunity model in a consequential risk framework that explores spatiotemporal scenarios of ecosystems with implications for optimal ecosystem design from eco-engineering to policy. |
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| ISSN: | 1470-160X |