Mediterranean environments are characterized by strong fluctuations in plant primary production. These fluctuations can regulate the carrying capacity of ungulate populations, but their effects may vary across spatial and temporal scales. In particular, habitat heterogeneity may allow wild ungulates to mitigate temporal fluctuations in plant production by using different resources along the year.
In the article Landscape heterogeneity increases the stability of wild ungulate populations facing climatic variability in Mediterranean ecosystems, published last week in STOTEN, J.M. Giralt and L. Santamaría use a 15-years dataset (including remote-sensing data and ungulate population counts) to assess how temporal variability in plant primary production and livestock abundance influence the population dynamics of two wild ungulates: native red deer and introduced fallow deer.
Results show that temporal alternation in the phenology of the four different vegetation types increased food availability for ungulates within each year; and complementarity in the responses of different vegetation types increased the predictability of food availability across different years.
Domestic ungulates had positive effects on wild ungulate density at low to intermediate abundances, but high livestock densities decreased ungulate density and constrained the stability of the plant-ungulate system in response to the impact of climatic variation, particularly under climate change.