Inferences of causes of synchrony

Inference of the causes of synchrony in field systems was classically considered to be a hard problem, but now it is considered pretty doable when sufficient data are available. We made contributions that helped contribute to that paradigm shift, including helping build wavelet-based approaches, originally developed for our aphid and marine plankton investigations (references below, see also here), and geographic approaches (reference below, see also here). We have since applied both those approaches to understand synchrony across a diversity of systems. Our review on synchrony and the conceptual benefits of long time series has content on this topic.

L.W. Sheppard, J. Bell, R. Harrington, D.C. Reuman. 2016. Changes in large-scale climate alter spatial synchrony of aphid pests. Nature Climate Change 6, 610-613. doi: 10.1038/nclimate2881.

L.W. Sheppard, E.J. Defriez, P.C. Reid, D.C. Reuman. 2019. Synchrony is more than its top-down and climatic parts: interacting Moran effects on phytoplankton in British seas. PloS Computational Biology 15, e1006744. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006744.

D.C. Reuman, M.C.N. Castorani, K.C. Cavanaugh, L.W. Sheppard, J.A. Walter, T.W. Bell. 2023. How environmental drivers of spatial synchrony interact. Ecography 10, e06795. doi: 10.1111/ecog.06795.

J.A. Walter, L.W. Sheppard, T.L. Anderson, J.H. Kastens, O.N. Bjørnstad, A.M. Liebhold, D.C. Reuman. 2017. The geography of spatial synchrony. Ecology Letters 20, 801-814. doi: 10.1111/ele.12782.

T.L. Anderson, J.A. Walter, T.D. Levine, S.P. Hendricks, K.L. Johnston, D.S. White, D.C. Reuman. 2018. Using geography to infer the importance of dispersal for the synchrony of freshwater plankton. Oikos 127, 403-414. doi: 10.1111/oik.04705.

People: Lawrence Sheppard, Jon Walter, Tom Anderson, Dan Reuman