Dispersal-induced persistence of chaotic ecosystems under extremeclimatic events

Abstract

Ecosystems are strongly disrupted by large-scale natural disturbances called extreme events which can potentially lead to their local extinction. In this work, we study one of the most important examples of this, namely, a coastal ecosystem interacting with a tropical cyclone, one of the strongest extreme weather events. We show, that the ecosystem, while perfectly self-sustainable when unperturbed, nevertheless undergoes a reduction in habitat quality when impacted by the extreme event. We show that a certain degree of dispersal between the affected patch and a less affected patch leads to non-zero population density, whereas the population of an uncoupled but affected patch suffers extinction. We also demonstrate that dispersal between two equally affected coastal ecosystems, eventually leads to the extinction of their populations. We show that the critical degree of dispersal for the persistence of the ecosystems under the onslaught of extreme events increases with both damage-susceptibility of the ecosystem and ferocity of the extreme event. We also analyze the dynamical behavior of the affected coastal ecosystem under increasing dispersal.