Climate change is disrupting myriad biological processes, including the ability of species to synchronize life‐history events with optimal environmental conditions, with potential fitness impacts. Changes in migratory and breeding phenology and their consequences on fitness have been well studied in birds and some mammals. By contrast, changes in the phenology of overwinter sheltering and their influence on fitness have rarely...

Effective conservation of biodiversity depends on the successful management of wildlife populations and their habitats. Successful management, in turn, depends on our ability to understand and accurately forecast how populations and communities respond to human‐induced changes in their environments. However, quantifying how these stressors impact population dynamics remains challenging. Another significant hurdle at this inter...

The familial structure of a population and the relatedness of its individuals are determined by its demography. There is, however, no general method to infer kinship directly from the life cycle of a structured population. Yet, this question is central to fields such as ecology, evolution and conservation, especially in contexts where there is a strong interdependence between familial structure and population dynamics. Here, w...

Studying evolutionary mechanisms in natural populations often requires testing multifactorial scenarios of causality involving direct and indirect relationships among individual and environmental variables. It is also essential to account for the imperfect detection of individuals to provide unbiased demographic parameter estimates. To cope with these issues, we developed a new approach combining structural equation models wit...

Assessing conservation strategies requires reliable estimates of abundance. Because detecting all individuals is most often impossible in free‐ranging populations, estimation procedures have to account for a .