The argument rests on a well-known mathematical pitfall. Ecological processes are overwhelmingly non-linear, and Jensen’s inequality, described in the literature as the fallacy of the average, shows that for non-linear functions the response of a system to average conditions differs from the average response to variable conditions. When ecologists aggregate individuals into species or population-level summaries and then assume equilibrium conditions, they risk drawing erroneous conclusions about how real systems respond to real, fluctuating environments. This matters more than ever because global change drivers — climate change, habitat loss, overexploitation, pollution and invasive species — often act synergistically, pushing ecosystems out of equilibrium and into transient dynamics that can last decades or even centuries.

The consequences of ignoring individual variation are not abstract. Take dispersal, the process that drives invasions, range shifts and the success of species establishment. Individual differences in dispersal ability, often linked to behavioural traits such as boldness or to genetic differences, can determine whether an invasive or colonising species establishes at all, with only specific phenotypes or genotypes managing the journey. Similarly, biodiversity responses to land-use change, landscape fragmentation and habitat loss have recently been tied to individual-level variation in behavioural and other traits. Individual responses play a pivotal role in priority effects, food-web dynamics, predator-prey and host-pathogen interactions, animal migration, community assembly and stability, nutrient supply, the formation of novel ecosystems and even the provisioning of ecosystem services such as fisheries yields.

Despite this growing evidence, few studies have causally linked individual variation to complex biodiversity dynamics and ecosystem functioning. Individual-based concepts have been developed in theoretical ecology, most notably through agent-based modelling, but these approaches have largely been confined to single species or simplified modules of pairwise interactions, with forest gap models among the few exceptions. The authors identify two main obstacles that have held back a truly integrated individual-based ecology: first, the difficulty of collecting and handling individual-specific data at scale, and second, insufficient computational power. Even disciplines where inter-individual differences are extensively documented, such as behavioural ecology, plant ecology and evolutionary biology, have rarely explored the consequences of that variation for higher ecological levels, often remaining focused on single species or pairwise interactions.

What has changed, the researchers contend, is technology. Recent massive advances in sensors and analytical tools now enable high-resolution data collection on a much larger scale, across multiple species, taxonomic groups and ecosystems. High-throughput animal tracking systems can monitor the physiology and behaviour of interacting individuals in real time. Multi-omics and meta-barcoding approaches can identify intraspecific and cryptic diversity and assess the distribution of community traits. In situ animal personality tests, advanced remote observations capable of detecting unique patterns of individual organisms, and mesocosm and microcosm experiments of experimental evolution are providing an empirical foundation that simply did not exist before. Machine learning and other advanced analytical approaches now provide the ability to process and interpret big datasets, linking data from large numbers of interacting individuals with high-resolution environmental data and system-level information.

The conceptual framework proposed in the article is called Individual-Based Global Change Ecology, or IBGCE. It aims to capture, understand and predict the emergent response of ecological systems to key drivers of global change by taking full account of the role of individual variation. The approach applies to all forms of life, from bacteria to plants, fungi, invertebrates and vertebrates, and places particular emphasis on resilience, non-linear transitions and emergent properties of ecosystems, functions and services. Individuals, in this view, are the elementary particles of ecological systems: variation and interactions between individuals scale up to emergent properties at the population, community and ecosystem levels, and these levels are interconnected through both bottom-up and top-down feedback loops that must be elucidated through an individual-based lens.

The road ahead, according to the authors, requires a systematic combination of empirical, experimental and modelling studies across systems, while accounting for multiple drivers of global change and their interactions, whether gradual or abrupt, predictable or stochastic. Field and experimental work on trait variation — in movement and decision making in animals, or in functional traits in plants and microbial communities — coupled with data science approaches, has already allowed the development and testing of new hypotheses on emergent phenomena. The next step is to systematically investigate how individual-level variation translates into community and ecosystem-level processes across organisational, taxonomic and ecological scales, from microbes to top predators, in both terrestrial and aquatic systems, and across metapopulations, metacommunities and biodiversity-ecosystem functioning relationships.

Theory must evolve alongside the data. The article highlights recent examples of integrating individual-based concepts from movement ecology into broader biodiversity theory, incorporating eco-evolutionary dynamics into community assembly, refining foraging theory to include adaptive behaviour, and extending modern coexistence theory with the complementary concept of coviability. Benchmark models and a common toolset are needed to advance individual-based theory and cross-fertilise with whole-system experiments. Among the promising technical solutions are adiabatic approximations, a method well established in physics for studying self-organisation, which allows quantitative assessment of how individual-level parameters affect aggregated population-level parameters. Alternatively, genetic algorithms can evolve simplified, robust rules for individual decision making that reproduce observed spatial and temporal patterns, while machine learning techniques, including neural networks and deep learning, can uncover those patterns in the first place. The authors pose a fundamental question that remains open: should model parsimony be the central consideration, or does the accuracy of predictions in capturing key patterns override parsimony?

The implications extend beyond theory into conservation practice. Individual variation is rarely explicitly considered in conservation and management decisions, even though it is highly relevant to stakeholders, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services. Large-scale harvest experiments coupled with high-resolution monitoring have shown how populations and ecosystem functions respond to trait-selective fishing, and how changes in behavioural traits can feed back to limit catchability, harvest and monitoring itself. Model-based results also highlight the importance of accounting for differences in animal behaviour in biodiversity conservation, particularly in reintroduction programmes where only limited numbers of individuals can be released. Understanding the feedbacks between individual variation and ecosystem management, the authors argue, will help refine existing approaches that still largely focus on populations, communities or aggregated landscape-level measures.

In the long term, the researchers envision the individual-based perspective reaching beyond the laboratory and the field into museums and schools, where IBGCE data, models and simulations could power interactive educational multimedia for inquiry-based learning and data-driven dialogue formats that involve the wider public in the process of acquiring knowledge. The stakes could hardly be higher. Future scenario analyses and predictions that ignore individual responses and rapid adaptations of organisms, along with the cascading eco-evolutionary processes that shape communities, run the risk of being short-sighted and potentially biased. By synthesising knowledge across systems and scales — linking ecology and evolution, aquatic and terrestrial systems, micro- and macroscales, and urban and rural landscapes — Individual-Based Global Change Ecology aims to provide a causal understanding of the mechanisms underlying eco-evolutionary dynamics, and a new foundation for adaptive and sustainable management under the non-equilibrium, non-stationary conditions that now define the Anthropocene.

Subject of Research: A proposed paradigm shift toward Individual-Based Global Change Ecology that treats individual organisms as fundamental agents of ecological change

Article Title: The need for an individual-based global change ecology

Article References: Jeltsch, F., Roeleke, M., Abdelfattah, A., Arlinghaus, R., Berg, G., Blaum, N., De Meester, L., Dittmann, E., Eccard, J. A., Fournier, B., Gaedke, U., Gallagher, C., Govaert, L., Hauber, M., Jeschke, J. M., Kramer-Schadt, S., Linstädter, A., Lucke, U., Mazza, V., … Zurell, D. (2025). The need for an individual-based global change ecology. Individual-based Ecology, 1, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.3897/ibe.1.148200

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/ibe.1.148200

Keywords: individual-based ecology, global change ecology, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, individual variation, adaptive behaviour, agent-based modelling, machine learning, eco-evolutionary dynamics, conservation, Anthropocene, predictive ecology

Coastal dunes are among the most threatened ecosystems on Earth, squeezed between rising seas, intensifying erosion, tourism, and urban expansion. What makes them ecologically remarkable is their strict spatial order. Moving inland from the waterline, plants sort themselves into zones: an unfixed zone of shifting sand nearest the shore, a semi-fixed zone behind it, and finally a fixed zone of stabilized dune where the most sensitive species live. Because each zone depends on precise gradients of salt spray, sand movement, wind, and soil conditions, the fixed zone is the first casualty of development and the hardest to restore. Its loss ripples through the entire system, taking rare plants with it.

The research team, led by Yuki Yamanaka, Keiko Nagashima, and Yasutaka Nakata, focused on Juniperus conferta, a low-growing shrubby juniper that serves as the classic indicator species of the fixed dune zone across Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Sakhalin. The species is listed as rare in ten Japanese prefectures and grows alongside threatened plants such as Viola grayi and Veronica ornata. The logic of the study is elegant: if you can map precisely where J. conferta survives and characterize the microtopographic conditions it requires, you gain a practical yardstick for identifying the remaining strongholds of the fixed zone, and by extension, the habitats of the rare species that depend on it.

The historical half of the analysis is sobering. Using an 1898 topographic map, United States military aerial photographs from 1947, and a 2009 aerial survey, the researchers built land-cover maps for three time slices and tracked what happened to the original dune surface. In 1898, sand dunes covered roughly 192 hectares, the largest dune area in Kyoto Prefecture. By 1947 that figure had fallen to about 106 hectares, and by 2009 only about 33 hectares remained, a decline of more than 80 percent in little over a century. Afforestation, which began in the Edo period to control drifting sand and accelerated during Japan’s postwar economic boom, accounted for roughly half of the original dune area by 2009, while urbanization and paddy fields consumed much of the rest.

The losses were strikingly uneven across the dune’s four sectors. In the west, the dune shrank to about a fifth of its original extent as forests and town expanded inland. The west-central sector suffered the steepest transformation, with approximately 80 percent of its 1898 dunes replaced by conifer plantations. The east fared worst of all: around 90 percent of its original sand dunes had been converted to other land uses by 2009, with wastelands mapped in 1947 largely becoming urban areas. Only the east-central sector, a rocky coastline where steep cliffs limited development, retained nearly all of its original sandy habitat, a quirk of geology that would prove decisive for the study’s rarest plants.

To capture the present-day physical template of the dune, the team deployed a drone equipped with LiDAR, a laser instrument that fires pulses at the ground and records the returning light to build a dense three-dimensional point cloud. From this they derived a digital terrain model at one-meter resolution, matching the scale of their vegetation quadrats, along with slope angle, curvature, distance from the shoreline, and elevation. Crucially, they also computed the difference between the 2024 drone-derived terrain model and a 2009 airborne LiDAR dataset, producing a map of elevation change across fifteen years. After correcting a systematic vertical offset of about 3.46 meters in the drone data using fifty stable reference points, they established a conservative detection limit of roughly 0.12 meters, meaning only elevation changes beyond that threshold were treated as real.

On the ground, the researchers surveyed 165 one-square-meter quadrats distributed randomly across the four sectors and classified the vegetation into seven communities using the Two-Way Indicator Species Analysis, a standard clustering technique for presence-absence data. The J. conferta community split into two ecologically distinct groups: one on sandy beach coasts and one on rocky coasts. In total, the surveys recorded 30 coastal dune species and 40 non-coastal species, including eight listed in the Kyoto Prefecture Red Data Book. The east-central rocky sector stood out with the highest species richness at 47 species and five rare species, while the heavily modified west sector contained no rare species at all and a relatively high proportion of alien plants.

The statistical core of the study used generalized linear models to ask which topographic variables best predict where each J. conferta community occurs. For the sandy-beach community, two factors emerged consistently: the probability of occurrence rose with increasing distance from the shoreline and with greater elevation change since 2009. This makes intuitive sense. The community’s stronghold in the west-central sector is the one place where the beach is wide enough, over 100 meters, for the full sequence of dune zones to develop, allowing pioneer communities to trap drifting sand and build the stable backshore that dwarf juniper shrubland requires. The rocky-coast community told a different story: models pointed toward shorter distances from the shoreline and higher elevation, but a sensitivity analysis accounting for spatial autocorrelation in the data weakened these effects, suggesting the pattern may reflect broader geomorphic processes, such as a history of coastal erosion, rather than simple topographic rules.

Bringing the two lines of evidence together, the study delivers a sector-by-sector diagnosis. The west-central area, despite pine plantations, still supports functioning zonation and a resident J. conferta community, though afforestation has opened the door to invasive species. The east-central rocky coast harbors the greatest concentration of rare plants, including Viola grayi and Veronica ornata growing symbiotically with the juniper, but it is also the sector showing net elevation loss, a signature of active erosion. Because plant roots stabilize rocky slopes, the researchers warn that erosion there could accelerate, leaving the rare fixed-zone communities perched precariously at the cliff edge. The west and east sectors have effectively lost their fixed zones altogether, one to plantations and alien invasions, the other to direct human modification of the dune surface.

The authors are careful about the limits of their framework. Soil salinity, moisture, nutrients, and grain size, all known drivers of dune vegetation, were not directly measured, so the model coefficients describe associations with topography rather than isolated causes. The historical and LiDAR analyses address different time scales and should be read as complementary rather than causally linked, and the findings from a single Sea of Japan dune may not transfer to coasts with different tides, winds, and climates. Even so, the message is powerful and portable: a single well-chosen indicator species, read through the lens of drone-borne laser scanning and archival maps, can pinpoint which parts of a degraded landscape still hold conservation value and which restoration efforts are most urgent. As coastal dunes continue to retreat worldwide under the combined pressure of stabilization plantings, urban growth, and tourism, that kind of quantitative, repeatable diagnosis may be the difference between documenting an extinction and preventing one.

Subject of Research: Indicator-based assessment of coastal dune ecosystem degradation using historical land-cover change and UAV-LiDAR microtopography

Article Title: Indicator-based assessment of coastal dune ecosystem degradation using historical land-cover change and UAV-LiDAR microtopography

Article References: Yamanaka, Y., Nagashima, K., & Nakata, Y. (2026). Indicator-based assessment of coastal dune ecosystem degradation using historical land-cover change and UAV-LiDAR microtopography. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101548. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101548

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101548

Keywords: coastal dunes, Juniperus conferta, UAV-LiDAR, land-cover change, ecosystem degradation, vegetation zonation, Kumihama Dune, rare species, digital terrain model, coastal erosion, conservation indicators, Japan