Modelling environmental stochasticity in adult survival for a long-lived species

Stochastic matrix population models are often used to help guide the management of animal populations. For a long-lived species, environmental stochasticity in adult survival will play an important role in determining outcomes from the model. One of the most common methods for modelling such stochasticity is to randomly select the value of adult survival for each year from a distribution with a specified mean and standard deviation. We consider four distributions that can provide realistic models for stochasticity in adult survival. For values of the mean and standard deviation that cover the range we would expect for long-lived species, all four distributions have similar shapes, with small differences in their skewness and kurtosis. This suggests that many of the outcomes from a population model will be insensitive to the choice of distribution, assuming that distribution provides a realistic model for environmental stochasticity in adult survival. For a generic age-structured model, the estimate of the long-run stochastic growth rate is almost identical for the four distributions, across this range of values for the mean and standard deviation. Model outcomes based on short-term projections, such as the probability of a decline over a 20-year period, are more sensitive to the choice of distribution.