Post provided by Bethan Hindle

Understanding Population Responses to Environmental Change

Rapid climatic change has increased interest about how populations respond to environmental change. This has broad applications, for example in the management of endangered and economically important species, the control of harmful species, and the spread of disease. At the population level changes in abundance are driven by changes in vital rates, such as survival and fecundity. So studies that track individual survival and reproduction over time can provide useful insights into the drivers of such changes. They allow us to make future population level predictions on things like abundance, extinction risk and evolutionary strategies.

Predicting the future isn’t a simple task though. Anyone whose washing has got soaked through after the weather forecast suggested the day would be dry and sunny will know that (though the accuracy of short term weather forecasts has increased dramatically in recent years). Ideally, if we want to predict what will happen to populations as their environment changes, we would identify the drivers of variation in their survival and reproduction. We do this by asking questions like ‘are years of low survival associated with high rainfall?’ But, this is not a simple task; identifying drivers and the time periods over which they act and accurately estimating their effects requires long-term demographic data.   Continue reading “Exploring Population Responses to Environmental Change When There’s Never Enough Data”