Environmental colour intensifies the Moran effect when population dynamics are spatially heterogeneous

Evidence for synchronous fluctuations of spatially separated populations is ubiquitous in the literature, including accounts within and across taxa. Among the few mechanisms explaining this phenomenon is the Moran effect, whereby independent populations are synchronized by spatially correlated environmental disturbances. The body of research on the Moran effect predominantly assumes that environmental disturbances within a local site are serially uncorrelated; that is, successive observations in time at a particular local site are independent. Yet, many environmental variables are known to possess strong temporal autocorrelation a character which has often been described as ‘colour’. The omission of environmental colour from research on the Moran effect may be due in part to the lack of methods capable of generating sets of time series with a desired colour and spatial correlation. Here I present a novel and simple method designated as ‘phase partnering’ to generate such sets of time series and I investigate the combined impact of spatial correlation and environmental colour on population synchrony in two common models of population dynamics. For linear population dynamics, and for a subset of nonlinear population dynamics, coloured environments intensify the Moran effect when population dynamics are spatially heterogeneous; in coloured environments the spatial correlation between populations more closely mimics the spatial correlation between their respective environments. Given that most environmental variables are coloured, these results imply that the Moran effect may be a far more significant driver of regional-scale population and interspecific synchrony than is currently believed.