Divergent ecological responses to typhoon disturbance revealed via landscape‐scale acoustic monitoring

Abstract

Climate change is increasing the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme weather events across the globe. Understanding the capacity for ecological communities to withstand and recover from such events is critical. Typhoons are extreme weather events that are expected to broadly homogenize ecological dynamics through structural damage to vegetation and longer‐term effects of salinization. Given their unpredictable nature, monitoring ecological responses to typhoons is challenging, particularly for mobile animals such as birds. Here, we report spatially variable ecological responses to typhoons across terrestrial landscapes. Using a high temporal resolution passive acoustic monitoring network across 24 sites on the subtropical island of Okinawa, Japan, we found that typhoons elicit divergent ecological responses among Okinawa's diverse terrestrial habitats, as indicated by increased spatial variability of biological sound production (biophony) and individual species detections. This suggests that soniferous communities are capable of a diversity of different responses to typhoons. That is, spatial insurance effects among local ecological communities provide resilience to typhoons at the landscape scale. Even though site‐level typhoon impacts on soundscapes and bird detections were not particularly strong, monitoring at scale with high temporal resolution across a broad spatial extent nevertheless enabled detection of spatial heterogeneity in typhoon responses. Further, species‐level responses mirrored those of acoustic indices, underscoring the utility of such indices for revealing insight into fundamental questions concerning disturbance and stability. Our findings demonstrate the significant potential of landscape‐scale acoustic sensor networks to capture the understudied ecological impacts of unpredictable extreme weather events.

Limited theoretical and empirical evidence that response diversity determines the resilience of ecosystems to environmental change

“…Theory links spatial insurance effects to temporal stability at local and regional scales (Wang & Loreau, 2016), and these links are driven by asynchronous dynamics among spatial habitat patches (Wang et al, 2017(Wang et al, , 2021; Figure 1). Variation in population or community dynamics among habitat patches may, in this way, be thought of as a type of response diversity; dissimilar dynamics across patches can facilitate a wider range of possible pathways through which ecosystems can respond to environmental perturbations (Ross, Friedman, et al, 2023;Vogel et al, 2019).…”

“…For example, environmental DNA (eDNA) and dietary metabarcoding can be used to quantify interspecific interaction strengths and how they vary with time or environmental conditions (Ushio et al, 2023) and to construct even complex ecological networks (Cuff et al, 2022). Similarly, passive acoustic monitoring provides a cost-effective method to generate time series of real-world ecological communities which can be used to answer a range of fundamental and applied questions (Ross, O'Connell, et al, 2023), including those concerning resilience or temporal stability and community change (Gottesman et al 2021;Ross, Friedman, et al, 2023;Sethi et al, 2023). Given that acoustic monitoring captures the vocal signals produced by multiple species simultaneously, studies focusing on the dynamics of multiple species across time and space (e.g., Ross et al, 2018) should ultimately be a useful resource for measuring response diversity empirically from observational datasets and linking it to various dimensions of ecological stability.…”