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Structured demographic buffering: A framework to explore the environment drivers and demographic mechanisms underlying demographic buffering
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  • Samuel Gascoigne,
  • Maja Kajin,
  • Shripad Tuljapurkar,
  • Gabriel Santos,
  • Aldo Compagnoni,
  • Ulrich Steiner,
  • Anna Vinton,
  • Harman Jaggi,
  • Irem Sepil,
  • Roberto Salguero-Gomez
Samuel Gascoigne
University of Oxford

Corresponding Author:samuel.gascoigne@biology.ox.ac.uk

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Maja Kajin
University of Oxford
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Shripad Tuljapurkar
Stanford University
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Gabriel Santos
National Institute of the Atlantic Forest (INMA)
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Aldo Compagnoni
Martin-Luther-Universitat Halle-Wittenberg
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Ulrich Steiner
Freie Universität Berlin
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Anna Vinton
University of Oxford
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Harman Jaggi
Stanford University
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Irem Sepil
University of Oxford
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Roberto Salguero-Gomez
University of Oxford
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Abstract

Environmental stochasticity is a key determinant of population viability. Decades of work exploring how environmental stochasticity influences population dynamics have highlighted the ability of some natural populations to limit the negative effects of environmental stochasticity, one of these strategies being demographic buffering. Whilst various methods exist to quantify demographic buffering, we still do not know which environment factors and demographic characteristics are most responsible for the demographic buffering observed in natural populations. Here, we introduce a framework to quantify the relative effects of three key drivers of demographic buffering: environment components (e.g., temporal autocorrelation and variance), population structure, and demographic rates (e.g., progression and fertility). Using Integral Projection Models, we explore how these drivers impact the demographic buffering abilities of three plant species with different life histories and demonstrate how our approach successfully characterises a population’s capacity to demographically buffer against environmental stochasticity in a changing world.