Data from: The diversity of population responses to environmental change

The current extinction and climate change crises pressure us to predict
population dynamics with ever-greater accuracy. Although predictions rest
on the well-advanced theory of age-structured populations, two key issues
remain poorly-explored. Specifically, how the age-dependency in
demographic rates and the year-to-year interactions between survival and
fecundity affect stochastic population growth rates. We use inference,
simulations, and mathematical derivations to explore how environmental
perturbations determine population growth rates for populations with
different age-specific demographic rates and when ages are reduced to
stages. We find that stage- vs. age-based models can produce markedly
divergent stochastic population growth rates. The differences are most
pronounced when there are survival-fecundity-trade-offs, which reduce the
variance in the population growth rate. Finally, the expected value and
variance of the stochastic growth rates of populations with different
age-specific demographic rates can diverge to the extent that, while some
populations may thrive, others will inevitably go extinct.