Unravelling processes between phenotypic plasticity and population dynamics in migratory birds

Populations can rapidly respond to environmental change via adaptive phenotypic plasticity, which can also modify interactions between individuals and their environment, affecting population dynamics. Bird migration is a highly plastic resource-tracking tactic in seasonal environments. However, the link between the population dynamics of migratory birds and migration tactic plasticity is not well understood.
The quality of staging habitats affects individuals’ migration timing and energy budgets in the course of migration, and can consequently affect individuals’ breeding and overwintering performance, and impact population dynamics. Given staging habitats being lost in many parts of the world, our goal is to investigate responses of individual migration tactics and population dynamics in the face of loss of staging habitat, and to identify the key processes connecting them.
We started by constructing and analysing a general full-annual-cycle individual-based model with a stylized migra...