Populations of thousands of vertebrate species are drifting toward the edges of their tolerable environments, and ecologists have no clear picture of how this silent shift erodes their stability—the buffer against sudden collapse. This matters because the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework now enshrines stability as a conservation target, yet the mechanisms that quietly undermine it remain poorly understood. The project will use niche theory—which maps how species respond to temperature, rainfall, and other conditions—to model stability loss directly. The team will analyse over 1.8 million population time series for more than 6,700 chordate species, calculating each population’s position within its species’ environmental niche and tracking how marginalisation affects stability. If successful, the research will produce tools to infer stability for data-deficient species, giving conservationists and policymakers a practical way to identify which populations are most at risk of collapse. This is fundamental science with a clear applied endpoint: better prioritisation of limited conservation resources in a changing world. The outputs could reshape how international targets are monitored and met.
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Stability loss is one of the most important current concepts in ecology as it is fundamentally linked to the persistence of populations in the face of changing environmental conditions. Stability provides a measure of how likely a population is to suddenly collapse, and consequently maintaining stability has become a core goal for ecologists and conservation biologists worldwide, a target recently enshrined in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity framework. However, global environmental conditions are changing, driving species away from their ideal environmental conditions and towards the margins of their habitats, with concomitant impacts on their fitness, reproductive success, and survival. These increasingly hostile environmental conditions have the potential to surreptitiously erode species’ stability, however the processes driving this are poorly understood. Here we will tackle this crucial gap in our knowledge in a fundamentally different way to what has been attempted before. We will use niche theory, which explicitly describes how species respond to differing abiotic conditions, to model how multifaceted environmental change can impact stability - a key determinant of population longevity. To do this we will use a newly compiled dataset of over 1.8M time series across the globe to build n-dimensional abiotic niches for over 6700 chordate species, and estimate each population’s position with a species’ niche space. We will then assess how niche marginalisation (the movement of species towards their niche edges) impacts the stability of populations, and model how changes in different components of a niche (e.g. temperature, rainfall, etc) will – in isolation and in combination – affect rates of stability loss. Finally, we will project how stability will change in space and through time over the coming decades to identify geographic regions where stability is being, and will be, lost at the fastest rates. The outcomes of this project have the potential to have significant impact both on our understanding of the effects of multifaceted global change on vertebrate populations worldwide, but also on our ability to predict what species and populations are most at risk of collapse/extinction. In particular, this project will generate tools to infer the stability of populations and species which are currently data deficient, providing next-generation modelling strategies for conservation prioritisation in a changing world. As such the outputs of this project will be of significant interest to a broad audience including conservationists (to help identify at risk species), policy makers (who will be held accountable to their international objectives of maintaining stability), and the general public (to more fully understand how humanity is shaping the world around us).
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