Modelling the unpredictability of future biodiversity in ecological networks

We consider the question of how accurately we can hope to predict future biodiversity in a world in which many interacting species are at risk of extinction. Simple models assuming that species’ extinctions occur independently are easily analysed, but do not account for the fact that many species depend on or otherwise interact with each other. In this paper we evaluate the effect of explicitly incorporating ecological dependencies on the predictive ability of models of extinction. In particular, we compare a model in which species’ extinction rates increase because of the extinction of their prey to a model in which the same average rate increase takes place, but in which extinctions occur independently from species to species. One might expect that including this ecological information would make the prediction of future biodiversity more accurate, but instead we find that accounting for food web dependencies reveals greater uncertainty. The expected loss of biodiversity over time is similar between the two models, but the variance in future biodiversity is considerably higher in the model that includes species interactions. This increased uncertainty is because of the non-independence of species—the tendency of two species to respond similarly to the loss of a species on which both depend. We use simulations to show that this increase in variance is robust to many variations of the model, and that its magnitude should be largest in food webs that are highly dependent on a few basal species. Our results should hold whenever ecological dependencies cause most species’ extinction risks to covary positively, and illustrate how more information does not necessarily improve our ability to predict future biodiversity loss.