Abstract
With the looming threat of abrupt ecological disruption due to a changing climate, predicting which species are most vulnerable to environmental change is critical. The life-history of a species is an evolved response to its environmental context, and therefore a promising candidate for explaining differences in climate-change responses. However, we urgently need broad empirical assessments from across the worlds ecosystems to explore these predictions. Here, we use long-term abundance records from 157 species of terrestrial mammal and a two-step Bayesian meta-regression framework to investigate the link between annual weather anomalies, population growth rates, and species-level life-history. Overall, we found no consistent effect of temperature or precipitation anomalies on annual population growth rates. Furthermore, population responses to weather anomalies were not predicted by phylogenetic covariance, and instead there was variability in weather responses for populations within a species. Crucially, however, long-lived mammals with smaller litter sizes had responses with a reduced absolute magnitude compared to their shorter-living counterparts with larger litters. These results highlight the role of species-level life-history in driving responses to the environment.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
john.jackson{at}zoo.ox.ac.uk, c.l.coeur{at}ibv.uio.no, jones{at}biology.sdu.dk
Data Accessibility All data presented in the current manuscript is publicly available. All code and analyses are archived in the following Zenodo repository: 10.5281/zenodo.4707232