Jonas Knape, Matthieu Paquet , Debora Arlt, Ineta Kačergytė, Tomas Pärt

1. How demographic factors lead to variation or change in growth rates can be investigated using life table response experiments (LTRE) based on structured population models. Traditionally, LTREs focused on decomposing the asymptotic growth rate, but more recently decompositions of annual ‘realized’ growth rates have gained in popularity.

2. Realized LTREs have been used particularly to understand how variation in vital rates translate into variation in growth for populations under long-term study. For these, complete population models may be constructed by combining data in an integrated population model (IPM). IPMs are also used to investigate how temporal variation in environmental drivers affect vital rates. Such investigations have usually come down to estimating covariate coefficients for the effects of environmental variables on vital rates, but formal ways of assessing how they lead to variation in growth rates have been lacking.

3. We extend realized LTREs in two ways. First, we further partition the contributions from vital rates into contributions from temporally varying factors that affect them. The decomposition allows us to compare the resultant effect on the growth rate of different environmental factors that may each act via multiple vital rates. Second, we show how realized growth rates can be decomposed into separate components from environmental and demographic stochasticity. The latter is typically omitted in LTRE analyses.

4. We illustrate how to use the approach in an IPM for data from a 26 year study on northern wheatears (Oenanthe oenanthe), a migratory passerine bird breeding in an agricultural landscape. For this population, consisting of around 50-120 breeding pairs per year, we partition variation in realized growth rates into environmental contributions from temperature, rainfall, population density, and unexplained random variation via multiple vital rates, and from demographic stochasticity.

5. The case study suggest that variation in first year survival via the random component, and adult survival via temperature are two main factors behind environmental variation in growth rates. More than half of the variation in growth rates is suggested to come from demographic stochasticity, demonstrating the importance of this factor for populations of moderate size.