Warm temperatures during cold season can negatively affect adult survival in an alpine bird

Climate seasonality is a predominant constraint on the lifecycles of species in alpine and polar biomes. Assessing the response of these species to climate change thus requires taking into account seasonal constraints on populations. However interactions between seasonality, weather fluctuations, and population parameters remain poorly explored as they require long-term studies with high sampling frequency. This study investigated the influence of environmental covariates on the demography of a corvid species, the alpine chough Pyrrhocorax graculus, in the highly seasonal environment of the Mont Blanc region. In two steps, we estimated: 1) the seasonal survival of categories of individuals based on their age, sex, etc., 2) the effect of environmental covariates on seasonal survival. We hypothesized that the cold season – and more specifically, the end of the cold season (spring) – would be a critical period for individuals, and we expected that weather and individual covariates would in...