Asking the pikas politely…
Alpine ecosystems face rapid climate change, yet long-term demographic responses to this change remain understudied. Long-lived alpine monocarpic plants like Tetraneuris grandiflora may be vulnerable to environmental volatility. While warming and snowpack changes impact plant vital rates, few studies examine how lagged climate effects compound over decades to create population trends. We investigate how historical climate variation drives the multi-decadal decline of a population of T. grandiflora at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Using 47 years of individual-based census data (1979-2025), we parameterized size-structured integral projection models (IPMs) featuring a recruit bank. We combined automated global selection for climatic effects with stochastic simulations, temporal hindcasting, and elasticity perturbation analysis across historical and modern climate regimes. Incorporating climate in IPMs substantially improved predictive hindcasting ability, especially when initiated in 1996 at the start of the population's decline. (RMSE decreased from 0.455 to 0.363). Stochastic projections confirmed a transition from population growth under the historical climate (λs=1.002 under 1979-1995 climate) to a shrinking population under the current climate (λs=0.946 under 1996-2025 climate). Modern climatic conditions amplified reliance on adult survival (elasticity rising from 0.179 to 0.278). Our findings demonstrate that modern climatic conditions create a situation where adult survival is more important to the population while also hurting adult survival.
Items connected by shared entities, co-authorship, citations, or semantic similarity.