文章基本信息

标题：Black-swan events in animal populations
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作者：Sean C. Anderson ; Trevor A. Branch ; Andrew B. Cooper 等
期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2017
卷号：114
期号：12
页码：3252-3257
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1611525114
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Black swans are improbable events that nonetheless occur—often with profound consequences. Such events drive important transitions in social systems (e.g., banking collapses) and physical systems (e.g., earthquakes), and yet it remains unclear the extent to which ecological population numbers buffer or suffer from such extremes. Here, we estimate the prevalence and direction of black-swan events (heavy-tailed process noise) in 609 animal populations after accounting for population dynamics (productivity, density dependence, and typical stochasticity). We find strong evidence for black-swan events in ∼ 4% of populations. These events occur most frequently for birds (7%), mammals (5%), and insects (3%) and are not explained by any life-history covariates but tend to be driven by external perturbations such as climate, severe winters, predators, parasites, or the combined effect of multiple factors. Black-swan events manifest primarily as population die-offs and crashes (86%) rather than unexpected increases, and ignoring heavy-tailed process noise leads to an underestimate in the magnitude of population crashes. We suggest modelers consider heavy-tailed, downward-skewed probability distributions, such as the skewed Student t used here, when making forecasts of population abundance. Our results demonstrate the importance of both modeling heavy-tailed downward events in populations, and developing conservation strategies that are robust to ecological surprises.
关键词：mass mortality ; ecological surprises ; population dynamics ; die-offs ; ecological risk