It has been a few weeks since the 15th Chinese Symposium on Biodiversity Science and Conservation, where the first “Seminar on Methods in Ecology and Evolution in China” was held. In these blog posts, we hear from some of the winners of the “Outstanding Young Scholar Award in Ecological and Evolutionary Methodology in China”. Here, winner Jin Liu discusses the background behind their research.
Post provided by Jin Liu.
I am Jin Liu, a postdoctoral researcher at Peking University. I am broadly interested in seasonality and eco-evo dynamics. My current research integrates theoretical modelling and empirical data to understand how animal migratory behaviour responds to global change, and the potential consequences of these changes to population dynamics and community interactions.
Every year, tens of thousands of migratory birds gather in the Chinese Yellow Sea, a crucial stopover site along the East Asia-Australasian Flyway. We’ve seen significant habitat loss due to land reclamation in recent decades, which has been suggested as a primary cause of population declines. However, my analysis of bird census data from the past 15 years reveals a counterintuitive pattern: bird numbers have increased despite habitat loss. This unexpected finding prompts me to explore the underlying reasons.
Migration is a life history strategy that can influence population demographic rates through the trade-off between individual energy reserves and timing. This led me to consider whether habitat loss could impact population dynamics by altering individual migratory behaviour. My idea was consistent with the basic principles of individual-based modelling (IBM), and my supervisor’s sketch during our discussion sparked my interest in developing such a model. The core of IBM is that individuals are the building blocks of a system, and the system’s properties emerge from how individuals interact with each other and their environment. What if I set up the rules governing individual migratory birds to see how population dynamics might change in response to habitat loss? With this question in mind, I decided to build my first IBM.
In this work, I discovered the critical role of stopover stages in influencing the migratory behaviour and population dynamics of migratory birds, and the connection between individual behavioural changes and population changes. The mystery behind the changes in bird numbers in the Yellow Sea has been uncovered: the loss of stopover site generates shifts in migratory behaviour, with individuals remaining on the stopover site for longer to obtain food due to a reduction in per capita food availability. The subsequent increasing population density on the stopover site has knock-on effects on population dynamics along their annual cycle, ultimately contributing to population declines.
After understanding the mechanisms linking behaviour changes to population dynamics, I started to think, how do changes in migratory behaviour affect species coexistence? Given that many different migratory species utilize the same migration route, I wondered how their interactions could be influenced by recent environmental changes. To explore this, I further modified my model framework to try to discover the mechanisms underlying interspecies interactions.
IBM is not just a modeling approach; it represents a way of thinking about ecological and evolutionary questions at the individual-level. With the rapid development of tracking devices for migratory species, an increasing amount of individual-based data is being collected. IBM has powerful potential to bridge theory and empirical data, and if we could make that happen we will undoubtedly achieve further progress!
Post edited by Lydia Morley
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