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The impact of the ongoing rapid climate change on natural systems is a major issue for human societies. An important challenge for ecologists is to identify the climatic factors that drive temporal variation in demographic parameters, and, ultimately, the dynamics of natural populations. The analysis of long‐term monitoring data at the individual scale is often the only available approach to estimate reliably demographic parameters of vertebrate populations. We review statistical procedures used in these analyses to study links between climatic factors and survival variation in vertebrate populations.

We evaluated the efficiency of various statistical procedures from an analysis of survival in a population of white stork, Ciconia ciconia, a simulation study and a critical review of 78 papers published in the ecological literature. We identified six potential methodological problems: (i) the use of statistical models that are not …