Here, biologists and statisticians come together in an interdisciplinary synthesis with the aim of developing new methods to overcome the most significant challenges and constraints faced by quantitative biologists seeking to model demographic rates.

Here, biologists and statisticians come together in an interdisciplinary synthesis with the aim of developing new methods to overcome the most significant challenges and constraints faced by quantitative biologists seeking to model demographic rates.

Here, biologists and statisticians come together in an interdisciplinary synthesis with the aim of developing new methods to overcome the most significant challenges and constraints faced by quantitative biologists seeking to model demographic rates.

This book gives a unifying framework for estimating the abundance of open populations: populations subject to births, deaths and movement, given imperfect measurements or samples of the populations. The focus is primarily on populations of vertebrates for which dynamics are typically modelled within the framework of an annual cycle, and for which stochastic variability in the demographic processes is usually modest. Discrete-time models are developed in which animals can be assigned to discrete states such as age class, gender, maturity, population (within a metapopulation), or species (for multi-species models). The book goes well beyond estimation of abundance, allowing inference on underlying population processes such as birth or recruitment, survival and movement. This requires the formulation and fitting of population dynamics models. The resulting fitted models yield both estimates of abundance and estimates of parameters characterizing the underlying processes.

This book presents and develops the basic methods and models that are used by demographers to study the behaviour of human populations. The procedures are clearly and concisely developed from first principles and extensive applications are presented.

Here, biologists and statisticians come together in an interdisciplinary synthesis with the aim of developing new methods to overcome the most significant challenges and constraints faced by quantitative biologists seeking to model demographic rates.