Résumé
Linking habitat use and individual demographic traits, such as survival, is complex. Studies on habitat-performance relationships are still limited in long-lived species as they require long-term spatial and demographic data that are often collected at different temporal scales. Here, we combined fine-scaled resource availability maps with individual GPS monitoring (N=170) and long-term capture-mark-resighting data (N=674), collected over 40 years, to investigate the effects of habitat structure and individual heterogeneity on the annual survival of female Alpine chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra) living in the Massif des Bauges, France. Female chamois live in stable socio-spatial structures (‘sub-populations’) so that we estimated the effects of habitat structure measured within the individual and the sub-population ranges. Using capture-mark-resighting models, we tested whether female adult survival varied according to the availability of high-quality resources, age, weather conditions and anthropogenic pressures within their home range and the area used by each sub-population. Current results suggest that female adult survival rate may vary among sub-populations and may depend on weather conditions and local resource phenology and availability. This is one of the few studies to try and identify variation in a highly canalized demographic trait for a long-lived species. Identifying spatial variation in survival within a given population can better inform conservation practices by disentangling the underlying source-sink dynamics between sub-populations and account for spatial heterogeneity in future management plans.