Data from: Local population collapse of Ross's and lesser snow geese driven by failing recruitment and diminished philopatry

• Main Authors: Weegman, Mitch, Alisauskas, Ray, Kellett, Dana, Zhao, Qing, Wilson, Scott, Telensky, Tomas
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2022
• Subjects: Arctic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5816262

We estimated survival and per capita production of young, as well as emigration and immigration, from 1997 to 2017 in Ross's goose Anser rossii and lesser snow goose Anser caerulescens caerulescens , which are sympatric species of migratory birds that nest in the central Canadian Arctic at one of the largest breeding colonies in North America. We formed age-structured integrated population models for each species that jointly analyzed live and dead encounter data as well as breeding adult population size and fecundity data to understand drivers of population dynamics. We compared the demography between species because both species increased during the 1990s and early 2000s yet thereafter snow geese declined, while Ross's geese continued to increase, then stabilized and similarly declined. Declines in Ross's and snow goose populations were caused by reduced per capita production of young, and juvenile survival, as well as increased adult and juvenile emigration. Stronger declines in juvenile survival in snow geese explain their earlier population decline compared to Ross's geese. Despite the divergence in population trends in Ross's and snow geese, we found strong synchrony in demographic rates which suggested substantial emigration from this colony and similar responses to environmental conditions. We provide a novel m-array implementation specific to a multi-state Burnham model which greatly improved computational efficiency and convergence of posterior estimates. Please refer to ReadMe file.