TY - JOUR T1 - The Ecological Forecast Horizon, and examples of its uses and determinants JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/013441 SP - 013441 AU - Owen L. Petchey AU - Mikael Pontarp AU - Thomas M. Massie AU - Sonia Kéfi AU - Arpat Ozgul AU - Maja Weilenmann AU - Gian Marco Palamara AU - Florian Altermatt AU - Blake Matthews AU - Jonathan M. Levine AU - Dylan Z. Childs AU - Brian J. McGill AU - Michael E. Schaepman AU - Bernhard Schmid AU - Piet Spaak AU - Andrew P. Beckerman AU - Frank Pennekamp AU - Ian S. Pearse Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/03/29/013441.abstract N2 - Forecasts of ecological dynamics in changing environments are increasingly important, and are available for a plethora of variables, such as species abundance and distribution, community structure, and ecosystem processes. There is, however, a general absence of knowledge about how far into the future, or other dimensions (space, temperature, phylogenetic distance), useful ecological forecasts can be made, and about how features of ecological systems relate to these distances. The ecological forecast horizon is the dimensional distance for which useful forecasts can be made. Five case studies illustrate the influence of various sources of uncertainty (e.g. parameter uncertainty, environmental , and demographic stochasticity, evolution), level of ecological organisation (e.g. population or community), organismal properties (e.g. body size or number of trophic links) on temporal, spatial, and phylogenetic forecast horizons. Insights from these case studies demonstrate that the ecological forecast horizon is a flexible and powerful tool for researching and communicating ecological predictability. It also has potential for motivating and guiding agenda setting for ecological forecasting research and development.Abbreviations: ER -