Coupled dynamics of body mass and population growth in response to environmental change

Arpat Ozgul (), Dylan Z. Childs, Madan K. Oli, Kenneth B. Armitage, Daniel T. Blumstein, Lucretia E. Olson, Shripad Tuljapurkar and Tim Coulson
Additional contact information
Arpat Ozgul: Imperial College London, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK
Dylan Z. Childs: University of Sheffield
Madan K. Oli: University of Florida
Kenneth B. Armitage: University of Kansas
Daniel T. Blumstein: University of California
Lucretia E. Olson: University of California
Shripad Tuljapurkar: Stanford University
Tim Coulson: Imperial College London, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK

Nature, 2010, vol. 466, issue 7305, 482-485

Abstract: Waking up to global warming Climate change affects the timing of regular events of plant and animal life, such as budding, migration and hibernation, as well as population dynamics and morphology. It is difficult to monitor all these interacting factors at once, but an extended life-history study of a hibernating mammal — a yellow-bellied marmot (Marmota flaviventris) population in a subalpine habitat in the Upper East River Valley, Colorado — provides data suited to the task. Climate change over the period 1976–2008 has caused earlier emergence from hibernation, lengthening the animals' growing season so that they are now heavier when they start to hibernate. At the same time, the fitness of large individuals has increased, leading to a rapid increase in population size. As Marcel Visser explains in the accompanying News & Views, the major challenge in climate-change ecology is to predict the impact of future climate change on populations. This work on marmots provides the type of data needed to achieve that aim.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09210 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nature:v:466:y:2010:i:7305:d:10.1038_nature09210

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

DOI: 10.1038/nature09210

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

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