The importance of a holistic approach to the factors determining population abundances

Abstract

Ogilvie, J. E., & CaraDonna, P. J. (2022). The shifting importance of abiotic and biotic factors across the life cycles of wild pollinators. Journal of Animal Ecology, 91, 2412– 2423. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365- 2656.13825. As global change and its multiple impacts continue to unfold across most of the planet, understanding how populations of wild species respond to changing conditions has become a major focus of ecological studies. Ogilvie and CaraDonna (Ogilvie & CaraDonna, 2022) focus on understanding how biotic and abiotic conditions affect bumblebee abundances. A major advance in their work is that, rather than focusing on a single measure of abun-dance at a particular life stage for each of the seven bumblebee species they survey (e.g. adult abundance), they focus on understanding the drivers of population abun-dance across the different stages of the species' life cycles. The authors specifically assess how three factors in particular, climate conditions, floral resource availability and previous life-stage abundances impact these abundances. A main finding in their study is that each of these three factors directly impacted a different life stage, show-ing that just focusing on a single life-stage would have resulted on a biased and incom-plete picture of how abiotic and biotic factors affect bumblebee population dynamics. Studies like this one emphasize the need to focus on understanding the demographic mechanisms that determine population abundances.