Measurements of spatial population synchrony: influence of time series transformations

Two mechanisms have been proposed to explain spatial population synchrony: dispersal among populations, and the spatial correlation of density-independent factors (the “Moran effect”). To identify which of these two mechanisms is driving spatial population synchrony, time series transformations (TSTs) of abundance data have been used to remove the signature of one mechanism, and highlight the effect of the other. However, several issues with TSTs remain, and to date no consensus has emerged about how population time series should be handled in synchrony studies. Here, by using 3131 time series involving 34 fish species found in French rivers, we computed several metrics commonly used in synchrony studies to determine whether a large-scale climatic factor (temperature) influenced fish population dynamics at the regional scale, and to test the effect of three commonly used TSTs (detrending, prewhitening and a combination of both) on these metrics. We also tested whether the influence of TSTs on time series and population synchrony levels was related to the features of the time series using both empirical and simulated time series. For several species, and regardless of the TST used, we evidenced a Moran effect on freshwater fish populations. However, these results were globally biased downward by TSTs which reduced our ability to detect significant signals. Depending on the species and the features of the time series, we found that TSTs could lead to contradictory results, regardless of the metric considered. Finally, we suggest guidelines on how population time series should be processed in synchrony studies.