Abstract
In a context of rapid climate change, the influence of large-scale and local climate on population demography is increasingly scrutinized, yet studies are usually focused on one population. Demographic parameters, including survival, can vary significantly across populations of a given species, depending on global or local climatic fluctuations but also on many other population-specific parameters such as breeding density, habitat naturalness, predation or parasitism. Such ecological differences between populations could lead to different paces-of-life (POL), whereby populations where individuals display higher reproductive investment and bolder behaviours would have lower survival probabilities. We use here long-term (19 to 38 years) monitoring datasets from four Mediterranean populations of blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus) to investigate the effects of sex, age class, large-scale and local climate temporal variation and population breeding density, on adult survival, using Capture-Mark-Recapture modelling. Environment heterogeneity in these four populations (two in evergreen and two in deciduous forests) has been linked to strong multi-trait phenotypic variation, suggesting blue tits in deciduous forests display faster POL compared to their conspecifics in evergreen habitats. The present results show heterogeneity in average survival probabilities across the four populations, with, as predicted, lower survival in the fast blue tits occupying deciduous habitats. Interestingly, the year-to-year variation in survival probabilities was synchronous among populations. This suggests that regional environmental conditions could drive survival fluctuations across populations. However, breeding densities were not correlated across populations, and we found no evidence that adult survival is correlated with either large-scale or local, climate temporal variation in these four blue tit populations. Finally, two of the focal populations displayed a linear temporal decrease in adult survival over the study period, calling for further investigation to explain this decline. Overall, this multi-site study shows that blue tit parental survival from one spring to the next can vary substantially across years, in a synchronous way across populations, yet the climate indices we used are not correlated with the temporal variation. This calls for further investigations in other potential drivers such as resource (in particular insect) abundance, predation or parasitism.
Highlights
Many temporal variations in ecological systems can be decomposed in cycles, in longer term trends, and in remaining ‘noise’ (André & Rousset, 2020; Wolkovich, Cook, McLauchlan, & Davies, 2014)
The recent ecological literature informs us that meteorological year-to-year variation can influence population demography in plants (Chang-Yang, Sun, Tsai, Lu, & Hsieh, 2016; Dalgleish, Koons, Hooten, Moffet, & Adler, 2011) and animals (Selonen, Wistbacka, & Korpimaki, 2016; Wood, Newth, Hilton, Nolet, & Rees, 2016), while recent trends in climate change cause temporal trends in demographic components and their variance across many different taxa of plants (Williams, Jacquemyn, Ochocki, Brys, & Miller, 2015) and animals (Massardier-Galata et al, 2017), including birds (Alves, Gunnarsson, Sutherland, Potts, & Gill, 2019; Gamelon et al, 2017)
The present study provides estimates for adult survival and recapture probabilities in four Mediterranean blue tit populations breeding in nest boxes, and explores factors that explain variation in adult survival across years
Summary
Many temporal variations in ecological systems can be decomposed in cycles (e.g. daily, seasonal, multi-annual), in longer term trends, and in remaining ‘noise’ (e.g. year-to-year variation) (André & Rousset, 2020; Wolkovich, Cook, McLauchlan, & Davies, 2014). These variations often result from abiotic environmental changes over time, such as climate or local weather variations, which in turn result in biotic responses to these changes, e.g. morphological, behavioural, physiological, phenological and/or demographic variations at the population scale. The demographic consequences of climate variation, and the link between climate, ecological factors, and demographic effects, are still insufficiently explored (see reviews Chevin, Collins, & Lefevre, 2013; Visser & Gienapp, 2019)
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