Data from: Consistent within‐individual plasticity is sufficient to explain temperature responses in red deer reproductive traits

Warming global temperatures are affecting a range of aspects of wild
populations, but the exact mechanisms driving associations between
temperature and phenotypic traits may be difficult to identify. Here, we
use a 36‐year data set on a wild population of red deer to investigate the
causes of associations between temperature and two important components of
female reproduction: timing of breeding and offspring size. By separating
within‐ versus between‐individual associations with temperature for each
trait, we show that within‐individual phenotypic plasticity (changes
within a female's lifetime) was entirely sufficient to generate the
observed population‐level association with temperature at key times of
year. However, despite apparently adequate statistical power, we found no
evidence of any variation between females in their responses (i.e. no
“IxE” interactions). Our results suggest that female deer show plasticity
in reproductive traits in response to temperatures in the year leading up
to calving and that this response is consistent across individuals,
implying no potential for either selection or heritability of plasticity.
We estimate that the plastic response to rising temperatures explained 24%
of the observed advance in mean calving date over the study period. We
highlight the need for comparable analyses of other systems to determine
the contribution of within‐individual plasticity to population‐level
responses to climate change.