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Identifying drivers of spatio-temporal variation in survival in four blue tit populationsuse asterix (*) to get italics
Olivier Bastianelli, Alexandre Robert, Claire Doutrelant, Christophe de Franceschi, Pablo Giovannini, Anne CharmantierPlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"
2021
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.28.428563v4.supplementary-materialYou should fill this box only if you chose 'All or part of the results presented in this preprint are based on data'. URL must start with http:// or https://
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Capture-Mark-Recapture modelling, survival, pace-of-life, blue tits, climate, density
NonePlease indicate the methods that may require specialised expertise during the peer review process (use a comma to separate various required expertises).
Climate change, Demography, Evolutionary ecology, Life history, Population ecology
No need for them to be recommenders of PCIEcology. Please do not suggest reviewers for whom there might be a conflict of interest. Reviewers are not allowed to review preprints written by close colleagues (with whom they have published in the last four years, with whom they have received joint funding in the last four years, or with whom they are currently writing a manuscript, or submitting a grant proposal), or by family members, friends, or anyone for whom bias might affect the nature of the review - see the code of conduct
e.g. John Doe [john@doe.com]
2021-01-29 15:24:23
Dieter Lukas