The timing of birth has marked impacts on early life and early development of newborns in many species. In seasonal environments, early‐born offspring often survive and grow better than late‐born offspring, but despite the long‐lasting effects of early conditions on life history traits, the influence of birth date on fitness has rarely been investigated for long‐lived species. In this study, we analyzed both the short‐ and lon...

There is increasing evidence that environmental conditions experienced early in life can markedly affect an organism's life history, but the pathways by which early environment influences adult phenotype are poorly known. We used long‐term data from two roe deer ( Capreolus capreolus ) populations (Chizé and Trois‐Fontaines, France) to investigate the direct and indirect (operating through fawn body mass) effects of environmen...

How populations respond to climate change depends on the interplay between life history, resource availability, and the intensity of the change. Roe deer are income breeders, with high levels of allocation to reproduction, and are hence strongly constrained by the availability of high quality resources during spring. We investigated how recent climate change has influenced demographic processes in two populations of this wides...

Whether different sources of mortality are additive, compensatory, or depensatory is a key question in population biology. A way to test for additivity is to calculate the correlation between cause‐specific mortality rates obtained from marked animals. However, existing methods to estimate this correlation raise several methodological issues. One difficulty is the existence of an intrinsic bias in the correlation parameter. Al...