Biology subjects

Wauchope, H. S.

Publications and source records attributed to Wauchope, H. S..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Time-lagged causal inference corroborates presumed drivers of North Atlantic seabird ecology

Disentangling causation from correlation is the foundation of the scientific method. Yet, growing evidence suggests that much observational ecology research has not correctly made this distinction due to inappropriate statistical modelling and unappreciated time-delays. Here, we apply time-lagged causal inference techniques to assess the drivers of seabird declines, using multi-decadal North Atlantic seabird data across the behaviour, mass, survival, reproduction and population size of two species ecology (Atlantic puffin, Fratercula arctica, and black-legged kittiwake, Rissa tridactyla). We demonstrate that both climate and anthropogenic activity can suppress breeding success and cause population declines. Moreover, population size is specifically impacted by delayed recruitment effects where both species decline after a lag corresponding to their estimated age of first reproduction. These North Atlantic seabirds are therefore at risk from future environmental and anthropogenic changes, as time-delays may result in populations already on an extinction trajectory prior to changes being detectable in their abundance.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

Responses of global waterbird populations to climate change vary with latitude

While climate change continues to present a major threat to global biodiversity and ecosystems, most research on climate change impacts do not have the resolution to detect changes in species abundance and are often limited to temperate ecosystems. This limits our understanding of global responses in species abundance--a determinant of ecosystem function and services--to climate change including in the highly-biodiverse tropics. We address this knowledge gap by quantifying abundance responses to climate change in waterbirds, an indicator taxon of wetland biodiversity, at 6,822 sites between -55{degrees} and 64{degrees}. Using 1,303,651 count records since 1990 of 390 species, we show that with temperature increase, the abundance of species and populations decreased at lower latitudes, particularly in the tropics, but increased at higher latitudes. These contrasting responses to temperature increase according to latitude indicate potential global-scale poleward shifts of species abundance under climate change, providing empirical support for predictions by earlier studies. The negative responses to temperature increase in tropical species and populations are of conservation concern, as they are often also threatened by other anthropogenic factors. Our results suggest that existing biases in studies towards temperate regions could underestimate the impact of climate change on waterbirds and other species.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2019

Vulnerable species interactions are important for the stability of mutualistic networks

Species are central to ecology and conservation. However, it is the interactions between species that generate the functions on which ecosystems and humans depend. Despite the importance of interactions, we lack an understanding of the risk that their loss poses to ecological communities. Here, we quantify risk as a function of the vulnerability (likelihood of loss) and importance (contribution to network stability in terms of species coexistence) of 4330 mutualistic interactions from 41 empirical pollination and seed dispersal networks across six continents. Remarkably, we find that more vulnerable interactions are also more important: the interactions that contribute most to network stability are those that are most likely to be lost. Furthermore, most interactions tend to have more similar vulnerability and importance across networks than expected by chance, suggesting that vulnerability and importance may be intrinsic properties of interactions, rather than only a function of ecological context. These results provide a starting point for prioritising interactions for conservation in species interaction networks and, in areas lacking network data, could allow interaction properties to be inferred from taxonomy alone.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

Effects of sampling duration and intervals on confidence in population trend estimates

Species population trends are fundamental to conservation, underpinning lUCN red-list classifications, many national lists of threatened species and are also used globally to convey to policy makers the state of nature. Clearly, its crucial to quantify how much we can trust population trend data. Yet many studies analyzing large numbers of population time series lack a straightforward way to estimate confidence in each trend. Here we artificially degrade 27,930 waterbird population time series to see how often subsets of the data correctly estimate the direction and magnitude of each populations true trend. We find you need to sample many years to be confident that there is no significant trend in a population. Conversely, if a significant trend is detected, even from only a small subset of years, this is likely to be representative of the populations true trend. This means that if a significant decline is detected in a population, it is likely to be correct and conservation action should be taken immediately, but if the trend is insignificant, confidence in this can only be high with many samples. Our full results provide a clear and quantitative way to assign confidence to species trends, and lays the foundation for similar studies of other taxa that can help to add rigor to large-scale population analyses.

ecology↗