Demographic Methods across the Tree of Life

Abstract

Abstract Demography is everywhere in our lives: from birth to death. Demography shapes our daily decisions, as well as the decisions that others make on us (e.g. bank loans, retirement age). Demography is everywhere across the Tree of Life. The universal currencies of demography—survival, development, reproduction, and recruitment—shape the performance of all species, from lions to dandelions. The omnipresence of demography in all things alive and dead, and its multiple applications to better understand the ecology, evolution, and conservation/management of species, allows us to—in principle—apply the wide array of quantitative methods to, for example, bacteria or humans. However, demographic methods to date have remained taxonomically siloed, despite the fact that, to a large extent, they are widely applicable across the Tree of Life. In this book, we walk nonexperts through the ABCs of data collection, model construction, analyses, and interpretation across a wide repertoire of demographic artillery. This book introduces the reader to some of the demographic methods, including abundance-based models, life tables, matrix population models, integral projection models, integrated population models, and individual based models, to mention a few. Through the careful integration of data collection methods, analytical approaches, and applications, clearly guided through fully reproducible R scripts, we provide a state-of-the-art thorough representation of many of the most popular tools that any demographer (or demographically inclined mind) should equip themselves with.