Data from: The influence of climate variability on demographic rates of avian Afro-palearctic migrants

Climate is an important driver of changes in animal population size, but
its effect on the underlying demographic rates remains insufficiently
understood. This is particularly true for avian long-distance migrants
which are exposed to different climatic factors at different phases of
their annual cycle. To fill this knowledge gap, we used data collected by
a national-wide bird ringing scheme for eight migratory species wintering
in sub-Saharan Africa and investigated the impact of climate variability
on their breeding productivity and adult survival. While temperature at
the breeding grounds could relate to the breeding productivity either
positively (higher food availability in warmer springs) or negatively
(food scarcity in warmer springs due to trophic mismatch), water
availability at the non-breeding should limit the adult survival and the
breeding productivity. Consistent with the prediction of the trophic
mismatch hypothesis, we found that warmer springs at the breeding grounds
were linked with lower breeding productivity, explaining 29% of temporal
variance across all species. Higher water availability at the sub-Saharan
non-breeding grounds was related to higher adult survival (18% temporal
variance explained) but did not carry-over to breeding productivity. Our
results show that climate variability at both breeding and non-breeding
grounds shapes different demographic rates of long-distance migrants.