Modelling Population Dynamics: model formulation, fitting and assessment using state-space methods

Provides unifying framework for estimating the abundance of open populations that are subject to births, deaths and movement in and out of the population

Going beyond the estimation of abundance, teaches ways of determining the reasons for variation in abundance over time and survival probabilities

Ecologists and wildlife managers will learn to model dynamics in annual cycles for populations of large vertebrates, including discrete time models

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.