Climatic conditions cause complex patterns of covariation between demographic traits in a long-lived raptor

1. Environmental variation can induce life-history changes that can last over a large part of the lifetime of an organism. If multiple demographic traits are affected, expected changes in climate may influence environmental covariances among traits in a complex manner. Thus, examining the consequences of environmental fluctuations requires that individual information at multiple life stages is available, which is particularly challenging in long-lived species. 2. Here, we analyse how variation in climatic conditions occurring in the year of hatching of female goshawks Accipiter gentilis (L.) affects age-specific variation in demographic traits and lifetime reproductive success (LRS). LRS decreased with increasing temperature in April in the year of hatching, due to lower breeding frequency and shorter reproductive life span. In contrast, the probability for a female to successfully breed was higher in years with a warm April, but lower LRS of the offspring in these years generated a n...