Distributions of LRS in varying environments

Studies of lifetime reproductive success (LRS) have shown that important random events can be in ecology and evolution. Randomness should be amplified in stochastic environments, and here we show here we show this to be the case by computing the complete distribution of LRS when vital rates are Markovian can be readily computed by building on our recent paper (Tuljapurkar et al. 2020). These results complement the work of van Daalen and Caswell (2020) on moments of LRS. We use empirical studies of Roe deer, Capreolus capreolus, to show that environments at birth have strong effects on future performance, and that analyses of the LRS in stochastic environments are a valuable element of studies of the consequences of climate change.