Jean-Dominique Lebreton

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive

1. To document and halt biodiversity loss, monitoring, quantifying trends and assessing management and conservation strategies on wildlife populations and communities are crucial steps. 2. With increasing technological innovations, more and more data are collected and new quantitative methods are constantly developed. These rapid developments come...

Nous présentons un cadre de réflexion général se basant sur la démographie des populations d’Oiseaux marins afin d’identifier des leviers de gestion pertinents pour leur conservation. Après avoir rappelé l’influence des traits d’histoire de vie sur la démographie, nous avons synthétisé les paramètres démographiques connus pour 27 des 28 espèces d’O...

Many animal populations are subject to hunting or fishing in the wild. Detailed knowledge of demographic parameters (e.g. survival, reproduction) and temporal dynamics of such populations is crucial for sustainable management. Despite their relevance for management decisions, structure and size of exploited populations are often not known, and data...

Insects appeared more than 400 million years ago and they represent the richest and most diverse taxonomic group with several million species. Yet, under the combined effect of the loss of natural habitats, the intensification of agriculture with massive use of pesticides, global warming and biological invasions, insects show alarming signs of decl...

In the context of global change, endangered species such as sea turtles undergo strong population dynamics changes. Understanding demographic processes inducing such changes is critical for developing appropriate measures for conservation and management. Nesting females of the French Guiana population of leatherback sea turtles Dermochelys coriacea...

With a decline exceeding 30% over three generations, the once-common European Turtle-dove is now considered globally threatened by IUCN. As a legal game species in 10 European countries, the recent International Single Species Action Plan for this species highlighted the need to carry out an assessment of the sustainability of current levels of hun...

Many populations are affected by hunting or fishing. Models designed to assess the sustainability of harvest management require accurate estimates of demographic parameters (e.g. survival, reproduction) hardly estimable with limited data collected on exploited populations. The joint analysis of different data sources with integrated population mode...

In the present context of concerns for biodiversity, the French Academy of Sciences produced in 2017 a report entitled "Mechanisms of adaptation of biodiversity to climate change and their limits". We briefly review here the production process and structure of the report, and summarize its conclusions and recommendations. The conclusions emphasize...

Biodiversity loss is a major challenge. Over the past century, the average rate of vertebrate extinction has been about 100-fold higher than the estimated background rate and population declines continue to increase globally. Birth and death rates determine the pace of population increase or decline, thus driving the expansion or extinction of a sp...

Predicting the impact of disease epidemics on wildlife populations is one of the twenty-first century’s main conservation challenges. The long-term demographic responses of wildlife populations to epidemics and the life history and social traits modulating these responses are generally unknown, particularly for K-selected social species. Here we de...

Estimating eco-epidemiological parameters in free-ranging populations can be challenging. As known individuals may be undetected during a field session, or their health status uncertain, the collected data are typically “imperfect”. Multi-event capture-mark-recapture (MECMR) models constitute a substantial methodological advance by accounting for s...

All values for bias and precision.

Case study of Serengeti spotted hyenas infected with canine distemper virus.

Understanding and modeling population change is urgently needed to predict effects of climate change on biodiversity. High trophic‐level organisms are influenced by fluctuations of prey quality and abundance, which themselves may depend on climate oscillations. Modeling effects of such fluctuations is challenging because prey populations may vary w...

Assessing the quality of fit of a statistical model to data is a necessary step for conducting safe inference. We introduce R2ucare , an r package to perform goodness‐of‐fit tests for open single‐ and multi‐state capture–recapture models. R2ucare also has various functions to manipulate capture–recapture data. We remind the basics and provide guide...

The extent to which the fitness costs of infection are mediated by key life‐history traits such as age or social status is still unclear. Within populations, individual heterogeneity in the outcome of infection is the result of two successive processes; the degree of contact with the pathogen (exposure) and the immune response to infection. In soci...

Assessing the quality of fit of a statistical model to data is a necessary step for conducting safe inference. We introduce R2ucare, an R package to perform goodness-of-fit tests for open single- and multi-state capture-recapture models. R2ucare also has various functions to manipulate capture-recapture data. We remind the basics and provide guidel...

Les études de la biodiversité, qui recoupent l’ensemble de l’écologie scientifique, font largement appel à des approches quantitatives très variées, souvent complètement intégrées aux problématiques de recherche, tant fondamentale qu’appliquée. La bioinformatique et la biomathématique de la biodiversité s’insèrent donc dans une ingénierie de l’écol...

The diversity of traits across species is organized around main axes of variation in life history. Among them, the slow–fast continuum first described by Stearns (1983) is the most frequently analyzed. After presenting the history of this slow–fast continuum, we perform an updated review of its empirical support from analyses of vertebrates. We sho...

The science of complex systems is increasingly asked to forecast the consequences of climate change. As a result, scientists are now engaged in making predictions about an uncertain future, which entails the efficient communication of this uncertainty. Here we show the benefits of hierarchically decomposing the uncertainty in predicted changes in a...

The conservation of wetlands, many threatened by human activities, is paramount to sustaining global biodiversity. Yet the protection of targeted wetlands may not be sufficient to protect the species they host because some species may also be impacted by alterations to the surrounding landscape. Some black‐headed gull ( Chroicocephalus ridibundus :...

The purpose of this text is to provide a broad overview of wildlife demography and explain how demographic approaches shed light on wildlife conservation and management issues. First, we summarize the main interactions between humans and wildlife and briefly review the history of research on wildlife demography and modern tools for wildlife demogra...

The consequences of releasing captive-bred game animals into the wild have received little attention, despite their potential demographic impact, as well as costs and/or benefits for recipient populations. If restocking aims at increasing harvest opportunities, increased hunting pressure is expected, which would then be supported by either wild or...

Change in the size of populations over space and time is, arguably, the motivation for much of pure and applied ecological research. The fundamental model for the dynamics of any population is straightforward: the net change in the abundance is the simple difference between the number of individuals entering the population and the number leaving th...

Summary Schedules of survival, growth and reproduction are key life-history traits. Data on how these traits vary among species and populations are fundamental to our understanding of the ecological conditions that have shaped plant evolution. Because these demographic schedules determine population growth or decline, such data help us understand h...

Understanding how climate change will affect animal population dynamics remains a major challenge, especially in long‐distant migrants exposed to different climatic regimes throughout their annual cycle. We evaluated the effect of temperature throughout the annual cycle on demographic parameters (age‐specific survival and recruitment, breeding prop...

In a rapidly changing world, understanding and predicting population change is a central aim of applied ecologists, and this involves studying the links between environmental variation and vital rates (survival, fecundity, etc.). Demographic analysis and modelling can be daunting for practicing ecologists, and here we provide an overview of some of...

Although it is today accepted that population viability analyses are needed at a meta-population level for most species, usually only single populations are moni-tored in the context of management and conservation programmes. This paper outlines a fairly general and easy-to-implement approach based on counts and capture–recapture data that allow th...

We examined individual heterogeneity in survival and recruitment of female Pacific black brant (Branta bernicla nigricans) using frailty models adapted to a capture-mark-recapture context. Our main objectives were (1) to quantify levels of heterogeneity and examine factors affecting heterogeneity, and (2) model the effects of individual heterogenei...

The incidental bycatch of seabirds in longline fisheries is one of the most striking examples of diffuse and incidental impact of human activities on vertebrate species. While there are various types of evidence of a strong impact of longline fisheries on seabirds, in particular albatrosses, the incidental bycatch mortality has never been directly...

We review methods for detecting and assessing the strength of density dependence based on 2 types of approaches: surveys of population size and studies of life history traits, in particular demographic parameters. For the first type of studies, methods neglecting uncertainty in population size should definitely be abandoned. Bayesian approaches to...

1. Harvest models are often built to explore the sustainability of the dynamics of exploited populations and to help evaluate hunting management scenarios. Age-structured models are commonly used for ungulate population dynamics. However, the age of hunted individuals is usually not recorded, and hunting data often only include body weight and sex...

Structured population models are widely used in plant and animal demographic studies to assess population dynamics. In matrix population models, populations are described with discrete classes of individuals (age, life history stage or size). To calibrate these models, longitudinal data are collected at the individual level to estimate demographic...

The development of computers, appropriate statistical methodology and specialized software has induced an explosion in empirical research on vertebrate population dynamics. Many long-term programs have led to impressive datasets and to the publication of hundreds of estimates of vital rates critical to many areas of ecology: evolution of life histo...

1. Mark–recapture studies are often used to estimate adult survival probability , which is an important demographic parameter for long-lived species, as it can have a large impact on the population growth rate. We consider the impact of variation in capture probability among individuals (capture heterogeneity) on the estimation of ϕ from a mark–rec...

Models concerning populations living in fragmented habitats are of increasing biological interest. As a consequence, there is a growing interest in metapopulation models and source-sink models. In this paper we introduce elementary discrete-time matrix models for subdivided populations. We discuss the stabilizing role played by migration, in partic...

Context. Monitoring the status of albatross populations and identifying the factors driving observed trends remain international conservation and management priorities. The shy albatross is endemic to Australia and breeds only on three Tasmanian islands. Aims. To provide a reliable total population estimate for shy albatross, including an assessmen...

In this paper we introduce a stochastic model for a population living and migrating between s sites without distinction in the states between residents and immigrants. The evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) is characterized by the maximization of a stochastic growth rate. We obtain that the expectation of reproductive values, normalized by some r...

The need to consider in capture-recapture models random effects besides fixed effects such as those of environmental covariates has been widely recognized over the last years. However, formal approaches require involved likelihood integrations, and conceptual and technical difficulties have slowed down the spread of capture-recapture mixed models a...

Examples of the impact of human activities on Vertebrate populations abound, with famous cases of extinction. This article reviews how and why Vertebrates are affected by the various components of global change. The effect of direct exploitation, while strong, is currently superseded by changes in use of all sorts, while climate change has started...

Non-invasive genetic sampling (NGS) is increasingly used to estimate the abundance of rare or elusive species such as the wolf (Canis lupus), which cannot be directly counted in forested mountain habitats. Wolf individual and familial home ranges are wide, potentially connected by long-range dispersers, and their populations are intrinsically open....

We examine the performance of a method of integrated population modelling for the joint analysis of different types of demographic data on individuals that exist in, and move between, different sites. The value of the approach is demonstrated by a simulation study which shows substantial improvement in parameter estimation when site-specific census...

Researchers often rely on capture-mark-recapture (CMR) data to study animal dispersal in the wild. Yet their spatial coverage often does not encompass the entire dispersal range of the study individuals, sometimes producing misleading results. Information contained in population surveys and variation in population spatial structure can be used to o...

We studied the effects of colony size on individual reproductive success in a multi-site population of Black-headed Gulls Chroicocephalus ridibundus where colony size ranged from 10 to 5,000 pairs. By focusing on family size, the number of chicks attended by individually marked parents, and accounting for between-individual variation, we detected a...

Whether different sources of mortality are additive, compensatory, or depensatory is a key question in population biology. A way to test for additivity is to calculate the correlation between cause-specific mortality rates obtained from marked animals. However, existing methods to estimate this correlation raise several methodological issues. One d...

Assessing conservation strategies requires reliable estimates of abundance. Because detecting all individuals is most often impossible in free-ranging populations, estimation procedures have to account for a <1 detection probability. Capture-recapture methods allow biologists to cope with this issue of detectability. Nevertheless, capture-recapture...

Detecting senescence in wild populations and estimating its strength raise three challenges. First, in the presence of individual heterogeneity in survival probability, the proportion of high-survival individuals increases with age. This increase can mask a senescence-related decrease in survival probability when the probability is estimated at the...

1. Some species (e.g. migratory species with high movement ability) are unlikely to experience any physical cost when dispersing, at least at the landscape scale. In these species dispersal is nevertheless behaviourally constrained to avoid non-physical costs such as the loss of familiarity with the breeding environment, and these constraints can b...

The impact of waterfowl harvest on the dynamics of duck populations remains incompletely understood. While wide-scale monitoring and management programs have been set up in North America, far less has been done in Europe where populations and harvest are essentially managed at country level with a sole focus on population size. Hence, comparing Nor...

Many fields of science begin with a phase of exploration and description, followed by investigations of the processes that account for observed patterns. The science of ecology is no exception, and recent decades have seen a focus on understanding key processes underlying the dynamics of ecological systems. In population ecology, emphasis has shift...

In any statistical analysis, assessing the goodness of fit of a model to the data is crucial to avoid drawing incorrect conclusions. U-CARE is a computer application that deals with the mandatory first steps of the analyses of capture–recapture data: the preparation of the data set and the assessment of the fit of a general model (Cormack-Jolly-Seb...

1. Reliable estimates of population parameters are often necessary for conservation management but these are hard to obtain for elusive, rare and wide-ranging species such as wolves Canis lupus. This species has naturally recolonized parts of its former habitat in Western Europe; however, an accurate and cost-effective method to assess population t...

Although the recruitment of breeders is as important to population dynamics as mortality, it has received far less attention from statisticians working at modelling capture histories of marked animals. However, two main approaches to studying local recruitment have become available in the last three years. Both deal with birds marked as chicks and...

Wildlife management and conservation is becoming ever more complex. Concomitantly, managers are in need of simple quantitative approaches and tools that could help them to make better management decisions. We present an approach that consists of generating a single simulated data set of expected data using a reference model, to which various captur...

Recolonization by wolves (Canis lupus) of areas of extensive sheep breeding in the French Alps in the early 1990s led to intense conflicts over losses of domestic livestock. We used data on depredations and sheep herd management from 45 pastures of the Mercantour Mountains of the French Alps to build models of attack and kill rates and to quantify...