ArticleThe Journal of ecology2016
Transients drive the demographic dynamics of plant populations in variable environments.
Article in The Journal of ecology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- Distinguishing Short-Term Versus Long-Term Responses in Cover-Class Structured Community Dynamics: A Test With Grassland Drought Response.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Structured Demographic Buffering: A Framework to Explore the Environmental Components and Demographic Mechanisms Underlying Demographic Buffering.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Scaling approaches and macroecology provide a foundation for assessing ecological resilience in the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Coral assemblages at higher latitudes favor short-term potential over long-term performance.Ecology · 2023Article
- Life history mediates the trade-offs among different components of demographic resilience.Ecology letters · 2022Review
- Management implications of long transients in ecological systems.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Review
- Article
- Transient LTRE analysis reveals the demographic and trait-mediated processes that buffer population growth.Ecology letters · 2018Article
- Population and evolutionary dynamics in spatially structured seasonally varying environments.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2018Review
- Propagule size and structure, life history, and environmental conditions affect establishment success of an invasive species.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Inferring transient dynamics of human populations from matrix non-normality.Population ecology · 2018Article
- Prioritizing management actions for invasive populations using cost, efficacy, demography and expert opinion for 14 plant species world-wide.The Journal of applied ecology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The dynamics of structured plant populations in variable environments can be decomposed into the 'asymptotic' growth contributed by vital rates, and 'transient' growth caused by deviation from stable stage structure.We apply this framework to a large, global data base of longitudinal studies of projection matrix models for plant populations. We ask, what is the relative contribution of transient boom and bust to the dynamic trajectories of plant populations in stochastic environments? Is this contribution patterned by phylogeny, growth form or the number of life stages per population and per species?We show that transients contribute nearly 50% or more to the resulting trajectories, depending on whether transient and stable contributions are partitioned according to their absolute or net contribution to population dynamics.Both transient contributions and asymptotic contributions are influenced heavily by the number of life stages modelled. We discuss whether the drivers of transients should be considered real ecological phenomena, or artefacts of study design and modelling strategy. We find no evidence for phylogenetic signal in the contribution of transients to stochastic growth, nor clear patterns related to growth form. We find a surprising tendency for plant populations to boom rather than bust in response to temporal changes in vital rates and that stochastic growth rates increase with increasing tendency to boom.
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