PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Alexander Kubisch AU - Anna-Marie Winter AU - Emanuel A. Fronhofer TI - The downward spiral: eco-evolutionary feedback loops lead to the emergence of ‘elastic’ ranges AID - 10.1101/008458 DP - 2014 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 008458 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/12/02/008458.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/12/02/008458.full AB - In times of severe environmental changes and resulting changes in the geographical distribution of animal and plant species it is crucial to unravel the mechanisms responsible for the dynamics of species’ ranges. Without such a mechanistic understanding reliable projections of future species distributions are difficult to derive. Species’ ranges may be highly dynamic and subject to ‘elastic’ behavior, i.e. a range contraction following a period of range expansion as a consequence of eco-evolutionary feedbacks due to (rapid) dispersal evolution. It has been proposed that this phenomenon occurs in habitat gradients, which are characterized by a negative cline in selection for dispersal from the range core towards the margin, as one may find with increasing patch isolation, for example. Using individual-based simulations and further numerical analyses we show in this study that the presence of Allee effects is a necessary condition for ranges to exhibit elastic behavior. The eco-evolutionary interplay between dispersal evolution, Allee effects and habitat isolation lead to the emergence of decreased colonization probability and increased local extinction risk after range expansion, which result in an increasing amount of marginal sink patches and thus range contraction. The nature of the gradient is crucial, as gradients which do not select for lower dispersal at the margin than in the core (especially patch size, demographic stochasticity and extinction rate) did not lead to elastic range behavior. Thus, we predict that range contractions are likely to occur after periods of expansion for species living in gradients of increasing patch isolation, which suffer from Allee effects.