Long-term trends and drought: Spatiotemporal variation in juvenile sex ratios of North American ducks.

ABSTRACT: Sex ratios affect population dynamics and individual fitness, and changing sex ratios can be indicative of shifts in sex-specific survival at different life stages. While climate and landscape changes alter sex ratios of wild bird populations, long-term, landscape scale assessments of sex ratios are rare. Further, little work has been done to understand changes in sex ratios in avian communities. In this manuscript, we analyze long-term (1961-2015) data on five species of ducks across five broad climatic regions of the United States to estimate the effects of drought and long-term trends on the proportion of juvenile females captured at banding. As waterfowl have a 1:1 sex ratio at hatch, we interpret changes in sex ratios of captured juveniles as changes in sex-specific survival rates dur

SUBMITTER: Ellis SL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9280441 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature