Partitioning prediction uncertainty in climate-dependent population models.

ABSTRACT: The science of complex systems is increasingly asked to forecast the consequences of climate change. As a result, scientists are now engaged in making predictions about an uncertain future, which entails the efficient communication of this uncertainty. Here we show the benefits of hierarchically decomposing the uncertainty in predicted changes in animal population size into its components due to structural uncertainty in climate scenarios (greenhouse gas emissions and global circulation models), structural uncertainty in the demographic model, climatic stochasticity, environmental stochasticity unexplained by climate-demographic trait relationships, and sampling variance in demographic parameter estimates. We quantify components of uncertainty surrounding the future abundance of a migrator

SUBMITTER: Gauthier G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5204174 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature