Biomedical subjects

George Sugihara

Publications and source records attributed to George Sugihara.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Fishing elevates variability in the abundance of exploited species.

The separation of the effects of environmental variability from the impacts of fishing has been elusive, but is essential for sound fisheries management. We distinguish environmental effects from fishing effects by comparing the temporal variability of exploited versus unexploited fish stocks living in the same environments. Using the unique suite of 50-year-long larval fish surveys from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations we analyse fishing as a treatment effect in a long-term ecological experiment. Here we present evidence from the marine environment that exploited species exhibit higher temporal variability in abundance than unexploited species. This remains true after accounting for life-history effects, abundance, ecological traits and phylogeny. The increased variability of exploited populations is probably caused by fishery-induced truncation of the age structure, which reduces the capacity of populations to buffer environmental events. Therefore, to avoid collapse, fisheries must be managed not only to sustain the total viable biomass but also to prevent the significant truncation of age structure. The double jeopardy of fishing to potentially deplete stock sizes and, more immediately, to amplify the peaks and valleys of population variability, calls for a precautionary management approach.

Animals↗

PubMed2006

Observations on related ecological exponents.

We observe a relationship among three independently derived power laws in ecology: (i) total number of species versus area, (ii) species frequency versus species length, and (iii) maximal body size versus area. Aside from showing how these historically disparate phenomena are connected, we show how recent empirical results relating the maximal body size of top terrestrial vertebrates to the square root of land area conform to a prior theoretical expectation given by two of the above power laws. Of particular interest is the observation that the exponent relating species length to species frequency suggests a dimension for niche space for terrestrial vertebrate assemblages of D approximately 3/2. This value, along with power law for maximal body size, versus area, gives rise to the canonical species area exponent z approximately 1/4.

Animals↗

PubMed2005

Distinguishing random environmental fluctuations from ecological catastrophes for the North Pacific Ocean.

The prospect of rapid dynamic changes in the environment is a pressing concern that has profound management and public policy implications. Worries over sudden climate change and irreversible changes in ecosystems are rooted in the potential that nonlinear systems have for complex and 'pathological' behaviours. Nonlinear behaviours have been shown in model systems and in some natural systems, but their occurrence in large-scale marine environments remains controversial. Here we show that time series observations of key physical variables for the North Pacific Ocean that seem to show these behaviours are not deterministically nonlinear, and are best described as linear stochastic. In contrast, we find that time series for biological variables having similar properties exhibit a low-dimensional nonlinear signature. To our knowledge, this is the first direct test for nonlinearity in large-scale physical and biological data for the marine environment. These results address a continuing debate over the origin of rapid shifts in certain key marine observations as coming from essentially stochastic processes or from dominant nonlinear mechanisms. Our measurements suggest that large-scale marine ecosystems are dynamically nonlinear, and as such have the capacity for dramatic change in response to stochastic fluctuations in basin-scale physical states.

Animals↗

PubMed2003

Predicted correspondence between species abundances and dendrograms of niche similarities.

We examine a hypothesized relationship between two descriptions of community structure: the niche-overlap dendrogram that describes the ecological similarities of species and the pattern of relative abundances. Specifically, we examine the way in which this relationship follows from the niche hierarchy model, whose fundamental assumption is a direct connection between abundances and underlying hierarchical community organization. We test three important, although correlated, predictions of the niche hierarchy model and show that they are upheld in a set of 11 communities (encompassing fishes, amphibians, lizards, and birds) where both abundances and dendrograms were reported. First, species that are highly nested in the dendrogram are on average less abundant than species from branches less subdivided. Second, and more significantly, more equitable community abundances are associated with more evenly branched dendrogram structures, whereas less equitable abundances are associated with less even dendrograms. This relationship shows that abundance patterns can give insight into less visible aspects of community organization. Third, one can recover the distribution of proportional abundances seen in assemblages containing two species by treating each branch point in the dendrogram as a two-species case. This reconstruction cannot be achieved if abundances and the dendrogram are unrelated and suggests a method for hierarchically decomposing systems. To our knowledge, this is the first test of a species abundance model based on nontrivial predictions as to the origins and causes of abundance patterns, and not simply on the goodness-of-fit of distributions.

Ecology↗