Team

The links between vital rates, limiting factors, and population growth are complex. Explaining and predicting population dynamics therefore requires decomposing demographic rates across the entire life cycle. In caribou (Rangifer tarandus), a vulnerable species, most populations are declining, yet the actual contribution of each vital rate and each factor to these declines remains unknown. The data exist: monitoring programs have documented Québec’s populations for decades. Taken individually, however, these data are sparse and poorly suited to assessing population dynamics. Combined in an integrated model, they could provide the time-varying estimates of vital rates and abundance that management requires. Therefore, I propose to extract everything these data can offer within a single analytical framework. For each boreal caribou population in Québec and Labrador, my project will produce annual abundance estimates with their associated uncertainty, as well as abundance forecasts. More broadly, my doctoral research will provide powerful tools for using all available and relevant demographic and environmental data to identify the limiting factors that most strongly influence population dynamics.