Climate-induced physiological stress drives rainforest mammal population declines

Climate change is a major driver of global biodiversity loss, yet the precise mechanisms linking climate change to population declines remain poorly understood. We developed a novel, broadly applicable framework that integrates biophysical, nutritional and population modelling to capture fundamental physiological constraints on mammalian herbivores and applied it to investigate the causes of declines in ringtail possums of the Australian Wet Tropics (Pseudochirops archeri and Hemibelideus lemuroides). Our approach bridges the gap between mechanistic (\"bottom-up\") models, which simulate species’ responses based solely on their traits and local microclimates, and the more common (\"top-down\") statistical models, which infer species’ responses from occurrence or abundance data and standard environmental variables. We quantified population dynamics over a 30-year period by generating species-specific estimates of temperature and water stress, foraging limitations, and linking these with annu..., , , # Climate-induced physiological stress drives rainforest mammal population declines [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fxpnvx13n](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fxpnvx13n) ## Description of the data and file structure File \"covs.csv\": * \"site\": study site ID * \"geology\": geological parent materials * \"elev\": elevation in m * \"lat\": latitude * \"long\": longitude * \"K\": potassium (cmon_c/kg) * \"N_kje\": Kjeldahl nitrogen (%) * \"NA\": sodium (cmon_c/kg) * \"P_kje\": Kjeldahl phosphorus (%) * \"map\": mean annual precipitation (mm) * \"mat\": mean annual temperature (ºC) * \"cn\": carbon to nitrogen ratio * \"basalt\": variable indicating whether a site is on basaltic soils Missing values in soil parameters are related to unsampled sites. This information was input through the Bayesian hierarchical biogeochemical model developed for the study (see JAGS code file). File \"biophysical_predictors.csv\" * \"bio_year\": biological year starting in April * \"site\": site ID * \"species\": ringtail possum species *...,