Improving assessments of data-limited populations using life-history theory ...

• Main Authors: Horswill, Cat, Manica, Andrea, Daunt, Francis, Newell, Mark, Wanless, Sarah, Wood, Matthew, Matthiopoulos, Jason
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2021
• Subjects: Bayesian hierarchical model; life-history trade-off; environmental impact assessment; marine renewables; missing data; seabird; data-limited; Black-legged kittiwake; FOS: Biological sciences; Black-legged Kittiwake
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qnk98sfg0; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.qnk98sfg0

1. Predicting how populations may respond to climate change and anthropogenic pressures requires detailed knowledge of demographic traits, such as survival and reproduction. However, the availability of these data varies greatly across space and taxa. Therefore, it is common practice to conduct population assessments by filling in missing values from surrogate species or other populations of the same species. Using these independent surrogate values concurrently with observed data neglects the life‐history trade‐offs that connect the different aspects of a population's demography. Consequently, this approach introduces biases that could ultimately lead to erroneous management decisions. 2. We use a Bayesian hierarchical framework to combine fragmented multi‐population data with established life‐history theory and reconstruct population‐specific demographic data across a substantial part of a species breeding range. We apply our analysis to a long‐lived colonial species, the black‐legged kittiwake Rissa ... : JAGS code and data for the correlated model. The script was written using JAGS (v. 4.3.0) via the “jagsUI” library (v 1.5.1) for program R (v. 4.0.2). It runs a Bayesian hierarchical model (“correlated model”) to reconstruct mean rates of adult survival and fecundity for 68 populations of black-legged kittiwake breeding in the UK and Ireland. Input data supplied. See Table S1 in the Supplementary Information for additional details on data sources. ...