Structured Demographic Buffering: A Framework to Explore the Environmental Components and Demographic Mechanisms Underlying Demographic Buffering

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 the strategies being demographic buffering. Whilst various methods exist to quantify demographic buffering, we still do not know which environmental components and demographic mechanisms are most responsible for the demographic buffering observed in natural populations. Here, we introduce a framework to explore the relative impacts of environmental components (i.e., temporal autocorrelation and variance in demographic rates) on demographic buffering and the demographic mechanisms that underly these impacts (i.e., population structure and demographic rates). Using integral projection models, we show how demographic buffering is more sensitive to environmental variance relative to environmental autocorrelation. In addition, environmental autocorrelation and variance impact demographic buffering through distinct demographic mechanisms—i.e., population structure and demographic rates, respectively.