"The induction of tipping points due to phenotypic plasticity driven feedback mechanisms"Fellows, BenedictEnvironmental change has caused dramatic global declines in biodiversity. Many individual organisms can respond to their changing environment through phenotypic plasticity, where variable traits are expressed depending on environmental conditions experienced. The effect of these individual changes on population dynamics, in particular tipping points (rapid and possible irreversible changes in a population), is an open question. By using a mathematically flexible and tractable framework that incorporates phenotypic plasticity, we develop an understanding of how this environment-trait relationship will affect ecological systems. It has been hypothesised that phenotypic plasticity will act as buffer from change, however, we demonstrate that phenotypic plasticity can counter-intuitively induce tipping points in a population, including where an increase in resource availability for a life-stage can reduce the abundance of that stage. Furthermore, rather than a species reaching a morphological limit leading up to a tipping point, we demonstrate that tipping points can be induced well before these trait extrema are reached. We prove that the functional form and parametrisation of reaction norms are vital to predict these novel tipping points, which have important consequences for empirical studies and our predictions of how species will respond to environmental change in the future. |
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