ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Black-swan events in animal populations.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Pleistocene demographic histories dominate contemporary genomic diversity in a continental radiation of Himalayan-Hengduan songbirds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Environmental variability shapes biodiversity and protected area priorities in Canada.Communications earth & environment · 2026Article
- Origins of Nearctic migratory landbird vagrants recorded in Europe revealed by feather isotopic analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- How resource abundance and resource stochasticity affect organisms' range sizes.Movement ecology · 2025Article
- Capturing stochasticity properly is key to understanding the nuances of the Living Planet Index.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Time-travelling pathogens and their risk to ecological communities.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Geomagnetic disturbance associated with increased vagrancy in migratory landbirds.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Abiotic conditions shape spatial and temporal morphological variation in North American birds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Effects of stochasticity on the length and behaviour of ecological transients.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Heuristics for the sustainable harvest of wildlife in stochastic social-ecological systems.PloS one · 2021Article
- Early effects of COVID-19 on US fisheries and seafood consumption.Fish and fisheries (Oxford, England) · 2021Article
- Article
- Phylogenetic signals and predictability in plant-soil feedbacks.The New phytologist · 2020Article
- Diversification insulates fisher catch and revenue in heavily exploited tropical fisheries.Science advances · 2020Article
- Weakened portfolio effects constrain management effectiveness for population aggregates.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2019Article
- Range expansion is associated with increased survival and fecundity in a long-lived bat species.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Improving risk assessments in conservation ecology.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Recruitment variation disrupts the stability of alternative life histories in an exploited salmon population.Evolutionary applications · 2019Article
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 [Formula: see text]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 [Formula: see text] 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.
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