Understanding the population consequences of disturbance - PubMed (original) (raw)

Review

. 2018 Sep 12;8(19):9934-9946.

doi: 10.1002/ece3.4458. eCollection 2018 Oct.

Cormac G Booth 3, Daniel P Costa 4, Erica Fleishman 5 6, Scott D Kraus 7, David Lusseau 8, David Moretti 9, Leslie F New 1, Robert S Schick 10 11, Lisa K Schwarz 12, Samantha E Simmons 13, Len Thomas 11, Peter L Tyack 14, Michael J Weise 15, Randall S Wells 16, John Harwood 11

Affiliations

Review

Understanding the population consequences of disturbance

Enrico Pirotta et al. Ecol Evol. 2018.

Abstract

Managing the nonlethal effects of disturbance on wildlife populations has been a long-term goal for decision makers, managers, and ecologists, and assessment of these effects is currently required by European Union and United States legislation. However, robust assessment of these effects is challenging. The management of human activities that have nonlethal effects on wildlife is a specific example of a fundamental ecological problem: how to understand the population-level consequences of changes in the behavior or physiology of individual animals that are caused by external stressors. In this study, we review recent applications of a conceptual framework for assessing and predicting these consequences for marine mammal populations. We explore the range of models that can be used to formalize the approach and we identify critical research gaps. We also provide a decision tree that can be used to select the most appropriate model structure given the available data. Synthesis and applications: The implementation of this framework has moved the focus of discussion of the management of nonlethal disturbances on marine mammal populations away from a rhetorical debate about defining negligible impact and toward a quantitative understanding of long-term population-level effects. Here we demonstrate the framework's general applicability to other marine and terrestrial systems and show how it can support integrated modeling of the proximate and ultimate mechanisms that regulate trait-mediated, indirect interactions in ecological communities, that is, the nonconsumptive effects of a predator or stressor on a species' behavior, physiology, or life history.

Keywords: anthropogenic disturbance; environmental impact assessments; marine mammals; nonconsumptive effects; population consequences; trait‐mediated indirect interactions; uncertainty.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

The Population Consequences of Disturbance (

PC

oD) conceptual framework, modified from National Academies (2017). The boxes within the dashed gray boundary line represent the effects of exposure to a stressor and a range of ecological drivers on the vital rates of an individual animal. The effects are then integrated across all individuals in the population to project their effects on the population's dynamics

Figure 2

Figure 2

Studies investigating the Population Consequences of Disturbance (

PC

oD) on marine mammals, updated from Nowacek, Christiansen, Bejder, Goldbogen, and Friedlaender (2016). The arrows indicate the functional steps of the framework (simplified on top) that were included in each study. White gaps in the arrows indicate studies that evaluated the link between behavior and vital rates directly, without estimating health

Figure 3

Figure 3

Decision tree to guide selection of the most suitable Population Consequences of Disturbance (

PC

oD) model for a given population, given data availability. Decision points are represented by diamonds, and possible outcomes by rectangles

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