Predominant role of survival on the population dynamics of a threatened species: evidence from prospective analyses and implication for hunting regulation

In Europe, many bird populations have undergone strong declines over the last decades. The European Turtle Dove is an iconic declining bird species that can be legally hunted in ten EU countries, with hundreds of thousands of birds being harvested annually in western Europe alone. The European Union urgently required from these member states to tackle illegal and legal unsustainable hunting to support migratory bird conservation (BirdLife International in European red list of birds. Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg. http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/22690419/1 , 2021), and to consider that a careful regulation of harvest for declining hunted species should be the norm. In this study, we investigated turtle dove population dynamics in the western European flyway. The objective was to assess the current population growth rate, the relative importance of survival, and fecundity in determining prospective turtle dove population change, and to quantify the current level of harvest at the western flyway scale. We developed a population model including recent estimates of vital rates obtained from the core of the breeding distribution in the western flyway. The outputs of the model reproduced the declining trend of the European Turtle Dove and identified a predominant role of survival on prospective population dynamics, implying a potential positive effect of hunting regulation on population growth. Our results support the idea that actions increasing survival, among which hunting regulation, may be an important leverage for population management in this species. This study represents a major step towards a thoughtful adaptive management approach of the turtle dove population, and could be used as a template for other declining hunted bird species.