Estimating the effect of temporally autocorrelated environments on the demography of density‐independent age‐structured populations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary In age‐structured populations, environmental autocorrelations influence the long‐run population growth rate as well as the variance in future population size. We used the concept of individual reproductive value to examine how autocorrelated environments affect the dynamics of age‐structured populations, leading to transparent interpretations and estimation of these effects. Environmental autocorrelation is expressed by the covariances between mean individual reproductive values for each age class and size of the same age class with stochastic components depending only on noise matrices from previous years. Thus, if an age class that is large in a given year also tends to perform better than the temporal average of that class in the contribution per individual to future population sizes, then the environmental autocorrelation will be positive. We use a simple model with temporal autocorrelation in recruitment rate to illustrate the theory through analytical results as well as stochastic simulations. We show how the effect of environmental autocorrelation, the term included in the long‐run growth rate, as well as influencing the variance of future population size, can be estimated using a combination of individual‐based demographic data and time series of fluctuations in age composition without estimating autocorrelations and cross‐correlations of large numbers of age‐specific vital rates. The method was applied to data from four mammal species. These analyses revealed that the influence of autocorrelations in the environmental noise on the dynamics of these species was small and in two populations almost negligible. The theoretical explorations as well as the empirical estimates indicate that the temporal scaling of the environmental autocorrelation must be long to substantially affect the long‐term population growth rate. The white noise approximation is therefore often very accurate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".