Population responses to environmental stochasticity are primarily driven by survival-reproduction trade-offs and mediated by aridity

Forecasting responses of natural populations to increasingly stochastic environments is a major challenge in Ecology and Conservation Biology. We now know that populations can modulate how their vital rates (e.g., survival, reproduction) change through time to minimise the negative impacts of environmental stochasticity. However, despite the important analytical and theoretical advances that have led to this knowledge, we still do not know (1) how much this ability of natural populations to buffer against environmental stochasticity can vary in nature, nor (2) the drivers of these strategies, with likely candidates including the environmental regimes themselves, as well as the life history traits and phylogenetic ancestry of the species of interest. To address these questions, we parameterised a Bayesian generalised linear mixed model with high-resolution vital rate data from 134 natural populations across 89 species of plants and animals. We show that population responses to environmental stochasticity vary three orders of magnitude along a demographic buffering continuum. Furthermore, the position of a given population along said continuum is predicted by a survival-reproduction trade-off and by the degree of aridity the population experiences. Our findings open a promising avenue of research to improve ecological forecasts and management of natural populations in the Anthropocene.