ArticleNature ecology & evolution2020
Nonlinear population dynamics are ubiquitous in animals.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Interaction matrices as unifying tools for navigating ecological complexity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Review
- Advances in causal discovery methods for ecological time series.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Temperature variation and life history mediate nonlinearity in fluctuations of marine fish populations worldwide.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Nonlinearity in marine fish populations is amplified by temperature variation and fast life histories.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Quantifying the effects of response diversity dynamics on ecosystem stability.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Temperature alters interactions and keystone taxa in the marine microbiome.The ISME journal · 2026Article
- The Equilibrium Conundrum.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Temporal complexity of terrestrial ecosystem functioning and its drivers.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Abrupt changes in algal biomass of thousands of US lakes are related to climate and are more likely in low-disturbance watersheds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Increasing environmental fluctuations can dampen variability of endogenously cycling populations.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- The impact of data resolution on dynamic causal inference in multiscale ecological networks.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Interaction network structure explains species' temporal persistence in empirical plant-pollinator communities.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- Toward a cohesive understanding of ecological complexity.Science advances · 2023Review
- Ranking species based on sensitivity to perturbations under non-equilibrium community dynamics.Ecology letters · 2023Article
- Differences in initial abundances reveal divergent dynamic structures in Gause's predator-prey experiments.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Life history adaptations to fluctuating environments: Combined effects of demographic buffering and lability.Ecology letters · 2022Article
- Forecasting in the face of ecological complexity: Number and strength of species interactions determine forecast skill in ecological communities.Ecology letters · 2022Article
- Chaos is not rare in natural ecosystems.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- Towards a system-level causative knowledge of pollinator communities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Nonlinear dynamics, where a change in the input is not proportional to a change in the output, are often found throughout nature, for example in biochemical kinetics. Because of the complex suite of interacting abiotic and biotic variables present in ecosystems, animal population dynamics are often thought to be driven in a nonlinear, state-dependent fashion. However, so far these have only been identified in model organisms and some natural systems. Here we show that nonlinear population dynamics are ubiquitous in nature. We use nonlinear forecasting to analyse 747 datasets of 228 species to find that insect population trends were highly nonlinear (74%), followed by mammals (58%), bony fish (49%) and birds (35%). This indicates that linear, equilibrium-based model assumptions may fail at predicting population dynamics across a wide range of animal taxa. We show that faster-reproducing animals are more likely to have nonlinear and high-dimensional dynamics, supporting past ecological theory. Lastly, only a third of time series were predictable beyond two years; therefore, the ability to predict animal population trends using these methods may be limited. Our results suggest that the complex dynamics necessary to cause regime shifts and other transitions may be inherent in a wide variety of animals.
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