Partitioning variance in population growth for models with environmental and demographic stochasticity

How demographic factors lead to variation or change in growth rates can be investigated using life table response experiments (LTRE) based on structured population models. Traditionally, LTREs focused on decomposing the asymptotic growth rate, but more recently decompositions of annual ‘realized’ growth rates have gained in popularity.
Realized LTREs have been used particularly to understand how variation in vital rates translates into variation in growth for populations under long-term study. For these, complete population models may be constructed by combining data in an integrated population model (IPM). IPMs are also used to investigate how temporal variation in environmental drivers affect vital rates. Such investigations have usually come down to estimating covariate coefficients for the effects of environmental variables on vital rates, but formal ways of assessing how they lead to variation in growth rates have been lacking. 
We extend realized LTREs in two ways. First, we furt..., , The data are in the form of .Rdata files that can be opened with the R software.