title: Predictability in community dynamics.
abstract: The coupling between community composition and climate change spans a gradient from no lags to strong lags. The no-lag hypothesis is the foundation of many ecophysiological models, correlative species distribution modelling and climate reconstruction approaches. Simple lag hypotheses have become prominent in disequilibrium ecology, proposing that communities track climate change following a fixed function or with a time delay. However, more complex dynamics are possible and may lead to memory effects and alternate unstable states. We develop graphical and analytic methods for assessing these scenarios and show that these dynamics can appear in even simple models. The overall implications are that (1) complex community dynamics may be common and (2) detailed knowledge of past climate change and community states will often be necessary yet sometimes insufficient to make predictions of a community's future state.
authors.affiliation: Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK.|Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, N-7491, Norway.
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Blonder
authors.affiliation: Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX2 6GG, UK.
authors.forename: Derek E
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Moulton
authors.affiliation: School of Natural Sciences, University of California - Merced, Merced, CA, 95343, USA.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Blois
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, 85721, USA.
authors.forename: Brian J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Enquist
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, N-7491, Norway.
authors.forename: Bente J
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Graae
authors.affiliation: School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK.
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Macias-Fauria
authors.affiliation: School of Biology and Ecology, University of Maine, Orono, ME, 04469, USA.
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: McGill
authors.affiliation: Department of Geography and Environment, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK.
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nogué
authors.affiliation: Section for Biodiversity & Ecoinformatics, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, DK-8000, Denmark.
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ordonez
authors.affiliation: Section for Biodiversity & Ecoinformatics, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, DK-8000, Denmark.
authors.forename: Brody
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sandel
authors.affiliation: Section for Biodiversity & Ecoinformatics, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Aarhus C, DK-8000, Denmark.
authors.forename: Jens-Christian
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Svenning
mesh_terms: D058448:Biota; D057231:Climate Change; D004463:Ecology / Q000379:methods*; D008954:Models, Biological; D011157:Population Dynamics
keywords: Alternate states; chaos; climate change; community assembly; community climate; community response diagram; disequilibrium; hysteresis; lag; memory effects