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.