Quantifying the effect of genetic, environmental and individual demographic stochastic variability for population dynamics in Plantago lanceolata

Simple demographic events, the survival and reproduction of individuals, drive population dynamics. These demographic events are influenced by genetic and environmental parameters, and are the focus of many evolutionary and ecological investigations that aim to predict and understand population change. However, such a focus often neglects the stochastic events that individuals experience throughout their lives. These stochastic events also influence survival and reproduction and thereby evolutionary and ecological dynamics. Here, we illustrate the influence of such non-selective demographic variability on population dynamics using population projection models of an experimental population of Plantago lanceolata. Our analysis shows that the variability in survival and reproduction among individuals is largely due to demographic stochastic variation with only modest effects of differences in environment, genes, and their interaction. Common expectations of population growth, based on expected lifetime reproduction and generation time, can be misleading when demographic stochastic variation is large. Large demographic stochastic variation exhibited within genotypes can lower population growth and slow evolutionary adaptive dynamics. Our results accompany recent investigations that call for more focus on stochastic variation in fitness components, such as survival, reproduction, and functional traits, rather than dismissal of this variation as uninformative noise.