Abstract
How and why animal populations change over time and across different regions are fundamental questions in ecology. Comprehensive insights into these questions can be achieved by jointly estimating demographic rates, demographic mechanisms of population change and environmental drivers of demography. We incorporated all available demographic data from the Northwest Europe wintering population of Eurasian wigeon (Mareca penelope) into an integrated population model to estimate population development and structure, demographic rates, contributions of different demographic rates to population change, and the environmental drivers of demography from 1976 to 2023. The population approximately doubled during this period, and temporal variation in population growth rate was driven mainly by changes in per capita production of young and female survival. Per capita production of young was positively affected by spring flooding and temperatures during brood rearing. Density dependence had a negative effect on per capita production of young. Cold winters reduced annual survival. Our findings emphasize the dominant role of per capita production of young in population dynamics for species like wigeon, highlighting the need for conservation plans that explicitly consider environmental drivers of reproduction. We also demonstrate that a warming climate can have multiple demographic effects across seasons.
Acknowledgements
We thank Research Computing at the University of Saskatchewan for computational resources on the Plato cluster. We thank Henk van der Jeugd, Gerard Müskens, Youri van der Horst, Kees de Jager and Jan Vegelin for their help in collecting the data. We thank national ringing centers and EURING for providing the banding data, and all hunters and other members of the public who voluntarily reported banded birds, provided wing sample data or participated in international waterbird surveys.
Funding
The modelling and manuscript preparation by AP, MP and AL was funded as part of the HABITRACK project funded by the European Union through its HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions (Project 101135047, HORIZON-CL6-2023-BIODIV-01 – Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services).
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The authors declare no competing interests.
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Capturing ducks for banding in UK and NL was carried out under licenses from the relevant authorities in both countries. Other ethics approval was not required for this study according to national legislations.
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Piironen, A., Brides, K., Christensen, T.K. et al. Per capita production of young and adult female survival drive population dynamics of a duck flyway population.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-71365-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-71365-w
Keywords
- Population regulation
- Climate change
- Survival
- Harvest management
- Integrated population model
Source: Ecology - nature.com
