inst/ms/salmonfolios-letter.md

In seananderson/metafolio: Metapopulation Simulations for Conserving Salmon Through Portfolio Optimization

Dear Dr. Schimel,

We would be grateful if you would consider our manuscript entitled "Portfolio conservation of metapopulations under climate change" for publication as an Article in Ecological Applications.

How does biodiversity stabilize ecology? While much is known of the effect of global change on abundance and richness, little is known of the effects on the stability of ecological systems. Here, we show the stabilizing effect of environmental response diversity (thermal tolerance) on salmon metapopulations under climate variability and change. Maintaining response diversity minimizes risk given short-term environmental noise and ensures persistence given long-term environmental change. Even when response diversity is unknown, doubling the number of subpopulations in the conservation portfolio is sufficient to halve metapopulation variability. Our work is novel and highly significant because we quantitatively show how conserving trait response diversity, such as thermal tolerance, may be critical to conserving metapopulations in the face of climate variability and change. Although the stabilizing effect of response diversity is a widely-held tenet of ecology, we provide one of the first measures of the importance of this effect.

This work is timely given the rapidly expanding interest in ecological portfolios, the increasing need for ecological prioritization that considers risk, and the still largely unquantified mechanisms driving temporal stability and productivity in metapopulations. The results will also be of broad interest to Ecological Applications readers due to the broad applicability of our model --- although we use salmon and temperature as examples to ground our results --- our analyses are applicable to a wide variety of taxa and environmental drivers. We focus on salmon because our recent global meta-analysis of metapopulation dynamics reveals that these broadly-distributed species have some of the best-understood and most data-rich metapopulation dynamics. We provide an R package to enable readers to extend our results to other taxa and drivers of local and global change.

This work is entirely original; none of it has been previously published and it is not under consideration elsewhere. All authors have approved this manuscript.

We would like to suggest the following five independent referees, listed alphabetically:

Amy W. Ando: [e-mail], Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Sean R. Connolly: [e-mail], School of Marine & Tropical Biology, James Cook University

Jon Hoekstra: [e-mail], Conservation Science Program, World Wildlife Fund

Michel Loreau: [e-mail], Station d'Ecologie Expérimentale du CNRS, Moulis France

Will Satterthwaite, [e-mail], Southwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA Fisheries Service

Thank you for considering our manuscript for publication and we look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely, Sean Anderson, Jonathan Moore, Michelle McClure, Nicholas Dulvy, Andrew Cooper

seananderson/metafolio documentation built on Feb. 13, 2024, 5:47 a.m.