Multispecies models for population dynamics: Progress, challenges and future directions

Abstract

Understanding how population dynamics are influenced by species interactions and the surrounding community is crucial for addressing many ecological questions, but requires modelling of complex systems involving direct, indirect and often asymmetric species interactions. Progress in developing multispecies models that can tackle this task is being made in multiple subfields of ecology, often with varying approaches and end goals but also facing shared challenges. We review some of the main challenges and the ways in which they are being addressed, highlighting a wide variety of methods that can support the development of multispecies models for understanding population dynamics. The main challenges that we examine are estimation of species interactions from limited data, the necessity of simplifications, and handling uncertainty in complex, multispecies models. In addition to reviewing a wide variety of approaches and methods for dealing with these challenges, we discuss future directions and make suggestions for how we believe the development of multispecies models for understanding population dynamics can move forward more efficiently.

The dependence of forecasts on sampling frequency as a guide to optimizing monitoring in community ecology

“…Consequentially, the question becomes whether growth rates can guide the selection of sampling frequencies also in multispecies studies. Moreover, species growth rates and the sampling frequency might impact not only the achieved forecast skills, but also the estimation of species interactions, which is a central aim of community ecology but crucially also strongly data-dependent (Marquez et al, 2022). It follows that if both forecasts and interaction estimates are affected by the sampling frequency, relations between them might be undetectable if the sampling design is inadequate.…”

The dependence of forecasts on sampling frequency as a guide to optimizing monitoring in community ecology

“…Consequentially, the question becomes whether growth rates can guide the selection of sampling frequencies also in multi-species studies. Moreover, species growth rates and the sampling frequency might not only impact the achieved forecast skills, but also the estimation of species interactions, which is a central aim of community ecology but crucially also strongly data-dependent (Marquez et al 2022). It follows that if both forecasts and interaction estimates are affected by the sampling frequency, relations between them might be undetectable if the sampling design is inadequate.…”