Lifetime fitness and changing life history traits in Red-cockaded Woodpeckers

Garcia, Victoria

Lifetime fitness and changing life history traits in Red-cockaded Woodpeckers

dc.contributor.author	Garcia, Victoria	en
dc.contributor.committeechair	Walters, Jeffrey R.	en
dc.contributor.committeemember	Karpanty, Sarah M.	en
dc.contributor.committeemember	Hawley, Dana M.	en
dc.contributor.committeemember	Kelly, Marcella J.	en
dc.contributor.department	Biological Sciences	en
dc.date.accessioned	2016-06-15T06:00:24Z	en
dc.date.available	2016-06-15T06:00:24Z	en
dc.date.issued	2014-12-22	en
dc.description.abstract	As environmental change continues and increases, understanding how species will respond to change and how these responses may affect populations will be important for conserving and managing species. Red-cockaded Woodpeckers (Picoides borealis) are well-studied and provide an ideal system in which to examine ecological and evolutionary questions related to life histories because monitoring them accurately is relatively easy, their behavior is well-described and structured. In this study, I examined the following questions using long-term data (1980-2013) from two study sites in North Carolina: 1) what traits contribute most to lifetime fitness, 2) how have traits changed over time and how is climate change influencing life history, and 3) to what extent are traits that contribute to fitness and that are changing over time heritable in this species. I found that a multitude of factors contribute to different aspects of fitness, including: parental age and hatch date affecting survival to year one and probability of attaining breeding status; and lay date, clutch size, age at first reproduction, and variance in clutch size affecting lifetime fitness. I also found that many traits were changing over time including lay date, clutch size, partial brood loss, and survival to year one. These traits were strongly influenced by local climate variables at each study site, but it is not clear that climate has changed over time at the study sites to account for all the observed changes in life history traits. Habitat improvement has also played a role as evidenced by increased fledgling production in terms of raw numbers (without accounting for covariates). I also found that lay date, clutch size, and partial brood loss had low heritabilities after accounting for other random and fixed effects. These results indicate that Red-cockaded Woodpeckers at these two study sites are shifting traits successfully in response to changing conditions, and that these changes are in the direction that increases aspects of fitness. These shifts indicate that individuals are plastic with respect to these traits, but most of the variance in traits was related to external habitat-associated factors rather than additive genetic variance or environmental × genotype interactions.	en
dc.description.degree	Ph. D.	en
dc.format.medium	ETD	en
dc.identifier.other	vt_gsexam:4422	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10919/71347	en
dc.publisher	Virginia Tech	en
dc.rights	In Copyright	en
dc.rights.uri	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/	en
dc.subject	individual fitness	en
dc.subject	lifetime reproductive success	en
dc.subject	inbreeding	en
dc.subject	climate change	en
dc.subject	animal model	en
dc.title	Lifetime fitness and changing life history traits in Red-cockaded Woodpeckers	en
dc.type	Dissertation	en
thesis.degree.discipline	Biological Sciences	en
thesis.degree.grantor	Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University	en
thesis.degree.level	doctoral	en
thesis.degree.name	Ph. D.	en