The elasticity analysis shows that changes in adult survival have greater impact on population changes (elasticity = 0.51) than fecundity (elasticity = 0.16), chick survival (elasticity = 0.16) or juvenile survival (elasticity = 0.16). The Monte Carlo simulations show a similar pattern; the rate of population change is highly correlated with changes in adult survival and not so much with other life history parameters (see figure \ref{642524}).
We estimated adult Black Harrier annual survival probability to be \(0.692\pm0.152\) (SE) from the survival analysis of \citet{Garcia_Heras_2019} GPS tracking data. In order to make population trajectories decrease at an average rate of ca. 1% per year, and given the great impact adult survival rates have on population dynamics, we necessarily had to fix adult survival to values centered around 0.75 (see prior figure?). Furthermore, the range of adult survival values consistent with the known population trend was quite narrow (0.7-0.8, see prior figure?)