Hardship at birth alters the impact of climate change on a long-lived predator

Fabrizio Sergio (), Giacomo Tavecchia, Julio Blas, Alessandro Tanferna, Fernando Hiraldo, Erkki Korpimaki and Steven R. Beissinger
Additional contact information
Fabrizio Sergio: Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC
Giacomo Tavecchia: Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMEDEA), CSIC-UIB
Julio Blas: Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC
Alessandro Tanferna: Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC
Fernando Hiraldo: Estación Biológica de Doñana - CSIC
Erkki Korpimaki: University of Turku
Steven R. Beissinger: University of California

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme events, such as droughts or hurricanes, with substantial impacts on human and wildlife communities. Extreme events can affect individuals through two pathways: by altering the fitness of adults encountering a current extreme, and by affecting the development of individuals born during a natal extreme, a largely overlooked process. Here, we show that the impact of natal drought on an avian predator overrode the effect of current drought for decades, so that individuals born during drought were disadvantaged throughout life. Incorporation of natal effects caused a 40% decline in forecasted population size and a 21% shortening of time to extinction. These results imply that climate change may erode populations more quickly and severely than currently appreciated, suggesting the urgency to incorporate “penalties” for natal legacies in the analytical toolkit of impact forecasts. Similar double impacts may apply to other drivers of global change.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33011-7 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-33011-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-33011-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().