title: Poor environmental tracking can make extinction risk insensitive to the colour of environmental noise.
abstract: The relative importance of environmental colour for extinction risk compared with other aspects of environmental noise (mean and interannual variability) is poorly understood. Such knowledge is currently relevant, as climate change can cause the mean, variability and temporal autocorrelation of environmental variables to change. Here, we predict that the extinction risk of a shorebird population increases with the colour of a key environmental variable: winter temperature. However, the effect is weak compared with the impact of changes in the mean and interannual variability of temperature. Extinction risk was largely insensitive to noise colour, because demographic rates are poor in tracking the colour of the environment. We show that three mechanisms-which probably act in many species-can cause poor environmental tracking: (i) demographic rates that depend nonlinearly on environmental variables filter the noise colour, (ii) demographic rates typically depend on several environmental signals that do not change colour synchronously, and (iii) demographic stochasticity whitens the colour of demographic rates at low population size. We argue that the common practice of assuming perfect environmental tracking may result in overemphasizing the importance of noise colour for extinction risk. Consequently, ignoring environmental autocorrelation in population viability analysis could be less problematic than generally thought.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Centre for Conservation Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), 7491 Trondheim, Norway. m.van.de.pol@myscience.eu
authors.forename: Martijn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: van de Pol
authors.forename: Yngvild
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Vindenes
authors.forename: Bernt-Erik
authors.initials: BE
authors.lastname: Sæther
authors.forename: Steinar
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Engen
authors.forename: Bruno J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Ens
authors.forename: Kees
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Oosterbeek
authors.forename: Joost M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Tinbergen
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001717:Birds / Q000502:physiology*; D057231:Climate Change; D004777:Environment; D053476:Extinction, Biological; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D011156:Population Density; D011157:Population Dynamics; D018570:Risk Assessment; D013696:Temperature