LINKING CONTEMPORARY VEGETATION MODELS WITH SPATIALLY EXPLICIT ANIMAL POPULATION-MODELS

Spatially explicit models for animal populations (SEPMs) necessarily embody assumptions about plant community structure and dynamics. This paper explores the advantages and limitations of directly linking animal SEPMs with models for vegetation dynamics. Such linkages may often be unnecessary. For instance, in research focussed on questions with short time horizons, the spatial patterning of vegetation can be reasonably approximated as a tired landscape templet for animal population dynamics. But if one needs to consider longer time scales (e.g., decades to centuries), landscapes will be dynamic. Models of vegetation dynamics provide useful tools for predicting landscape dynamics. We outline the sorts of output from vegetation models that might be useful in animal SEPMs. We discuss as a concrete example recent forest simulators, which predict with reasonable accuracy some variables (e.g., tree species composition), but which, to date, are quite poor for others (e.g., seed production). Moreover, because vegetation models target a restricted range of temporal and spatial scales, they may be more useful for certain consumer groups than for others. Despite these cautionary observations, we believe that the time is ripe for fruitful linkages between models of vegetation dynamics and animal SEPMs.