Extreme events strongly impact ecological populations. With continued climate change, extreme weather events are predicted to increase in frequency and/or severity. However, current climate models deal with extreme events on a large spatial scale (>10,000 sq km), too large to capture the dynamics affecting ecological populations on a local level. There is also a lack of research quantitatively integrating the impacts of extreme events into ecological population models.
I review approaches used in various ecological contexts to model the distribution of extreme values, to obtain local parameterizations of extreme value distributions, and to model the consequences of extreme events.
Results/Conclusions
I discuss the ways in which distributions of extreme events can be integrated into population models, for single species and for several interesting species. I show that we can use both extinction probabilities, and the use of measures related to permanence and resilience. I also discuss challenges of analyzing the many dimensions of the impact of extreme events, Including ecological impacts and impacts on the built environment.