Hindle, B.J., Pilkington, J.G., Pemberton, J.M. et al. (1 more author) (2019) Cumulative weather effects can impact across the whole life cycle. Global Change Biology, 25 (10). pp. 3282-3293. ISSN 1354-1013
Abstract
Predicting how species will be affected by future climatic change requires the underlying environmental drivers to be identified. As vital rates vary over the lifecycle, structured population models derived from statistical environment–demography relationships are often used to inform such predictions. Environmental drivers are typically identified independently for different vital rates and demographic classes. However, these rates often exhibit positive temporal covariance, suggesting that vital rates respond to common environmental drivers. Additionally, models often only incorporate average weather conditions during a single, a priori chosen time window (e.g. monthly means). Mismatches between these windows and the period when the vital rates are sensitive to variation in climate decrease the predictive performance of such approaches. We used a demographic structural equation model (SEM) to demonstrate that a single axis of environmental variation drives the majority of the (co)variation in survival, reproduction, and twinning across six age–sex classes in a Soay sheep population. This axis provides a simple target for the complex task of identifying the drivers of vital rate variation. We used functional linear models (FLMs) to determine the critical windows of three local climatic drivers, allowing the magnitude and direction of the climate effects to differ over time. Previously unidentified lagged climatic effects were detected in this well‐studied population. The FLMs had a better predictive performance than selecting a critical window a priori, but not than a large‐scale climate index. Positive covariance amongst vital rates and temporal variation in the effects of environmental drivers are common, suggesting our SEM–FLM approach is a widely applicable tool for exploring the joint responses of vital rates to environmental change.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 The Authors. Global Change Biology Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | climate; covariation; density dependence; environmental variation; functional linear model; North Atlantic Oscillation; structural equation model; survival |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield) > Department of Animal and Plant Sciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 07 Feb 2020 16:27 |
Last Modified: | 07 Feb 2020 16:27 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1111/gcb.14742 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:155423 |