Meeting Abstract
Over the past two decades ecological theoreticians have begun to incorporate environmental attributes such as temperature into the classical models that underpin a variety of ecological processes and systems. However, as a starting point, much of this work has focused on the impact of altering the static environment as a proxy for climate warming and other gradual change. Although this approach has yielded important insight, it has largely ignored the role of environmental variability at the shorter-term time-scales that maintain ecological systems in a non-equilibrium state. Using a series of simple theoretical models I demonstrate how the different statistical moments (e.g. mean, variance, skewness, etc.) can impact the performance of a population, its risk of extinction and various aspects of its population dynamics. Coupling this information to a well-studied set of 38 ectothermic insects and other more recently collected dataset on thermal performance, I demonstrate that the interaction between the mean and variance of future climate is the most important factor driving population performance and extinction risk. This work highlights the importance of considering short-term fluctuations in temperature when making predictions about the risk of altered climatic conditions. Yet, it also highlights important gaps in our knowledge that link short-term variation to the fundamental rates that govern population dynamics.
