This book is a "How To" guide for modeling population dynamics using
Integral Projection Models (IPM) starting from observational data. It is
written by a leading research team in this area and includes code in the
R language (in the text and online) to carry out all computations. The
intended audience are ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and
mathematical biologists interested in developing data-driven models for
animal and plant populations. IPMs may seem hard as they involve
integrals. The aim of this book is to demystify IPMs, so they become the
model of choice for populations structured by size or other continuously
varying traits. The book uses real examples of increasing complexity to
show how the life-cycle of the study organism naturally leads to the
appropriate statistical analysis, which leads directly to the IPM
itself. A wide range of model types and analyses are presented,
including model construction, computational methods, and the underlying
theory, with the more technical material in Boxes and Appendices.
Self-contained R code which replicates all of the figures and
calculations within the text is available to readers on GitHub.
Stephen P. Ellner is Horace White Professor of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, USA; Dylan Z. Childs is
Lecturer and NERC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Animal and
Plant Sciences at The University of Sheffield, UK; Mark Rees is
Professor in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at The
University of Sheffield, UK.