Changing climate outside the extents of species adaptability results in the collapse of ecosystem-level diversity. Rising temperature is known to lower species abundance which in turn triggers extinction. Evidence suggests that species will disperse to a suitable climate niche as a response to changing temperature. However, dispersal, being sensitive to changing climatic conditions, population size, considerably varies within organisms, thus posing conflicting consequences on population persistence. Dispersal promotes stability by allowing recolonization, but at times it can elevate the chance of extinction by globally synchronizing populations. Therefore, various processes in a metacommunity whereby dispersal can inhibit or promote synchrony need to be examined. Here, we try to address the following questions: Whether dispersal can induce stability under changing environmental conditions? Can rising temperature promote synchrony and erode the stabilizing effect of dispersal? In an attempt to answer these questions, we consider a metacommunity model with temperature-dependent traits and study how the rising temperature governing species' local dynamics alters dispersal response at the regional scale. We analyze the effect of species' temperature-dependent life-history traits on a metacommunity with diverse dispersal strategies (i.e., constant and density-dependent dispersal), tracked along with different dispersal rates of species (relative dispersal).
Results/Conclusions
We find that high temperatures completely synchronize the population trailing constant dispersal, weakening the stabilizing dynamics. However, density-dependent dispersal strongly affects the stability of metacommunity at high temperatures by increasing or decreasing spatial synchrony depending on dispersal rates. Furthermore, on considering metacommunity with a large number of patches we find that conditional upon temperature, species abundance exhibits coexistence of synchronous and asynchronous oscillations, namely the chimera state. Our results show that rising temperature may destabilize the dynamics by synchronizing populations; however, some dispersal mechanisms might impede the adverse outcomes.
