Professor University of British Columbia Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Background/Question/Methods Information processing is increasingly recognized as a fundamental component of life in variable environments, including the evolved use of environmental cues, biomolecular networks, and social learning. Historically, information in ecology has been equated with a variety ofenvironmental cues including environmental changes that trigger phenological shifts, social or chemical signals used to find food, shared between bacteria to monitor local densities, or transmitted between plants as volatile organic compounds triggered by defense against herbivores. However, ecology still lacks a quantitative and generalizable framework for understanding how population, community, and ecosystem dynamics are impacted when organisms processany of these sources of information. Here, I presenta novel framework for the ‘fitness value of information’ (FVOI) that synthesizes ecological theory and information theory to elucidate the influence of information on ecological dynamics. I apply the FVOI to several familiar mathematical models of population growth (including the lottery model)to investigate how information can impact both single species and multispecies competitive dynamics.
Results/Conclusions I demonstrate how the fitness value of information can be measured via per-capita population growth rates, and furthermore that the FVOI framework parses per-capita growth into components that show the potential value of information, and how much fitness value is lost because a population fails to anticipate its environment. Using population models, I use the FVOI to further develop understanding of when information can and cannot improve a population’s recovery from low density. In multispecies models, I find the potential for an “information niche:” a compliment to fluctuation-based coexistence mechanisms that interacts with the storage effect in the lottery model. Because these mechanisms mediate fitness through universal features of population dynamics they are generalizable and comparable across different systems. An important extension of the FVOI is to interpret how ecological information mediates anthropogenic impacts on fitness, especially when anthropogenic change alters important light, sound, and temperature cues that organisms have evolved to depend on.
