Population Parameters: Estimation for Ecological Models

By Hamish McCallum. 2000

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ecologists and environmental managers rely on mathematical models, both to understand ecological systems and to predict future system behavior. In turn, models rely on appropriate estimates of their parameters. This book brings together a diverse and scattered literature, to provide clear guidance on how to estimate parameters for models of animal populations. It is not a recipe book of statistical procedures. Instead, it concentrates on how to select the best approach to parameter estimation for a particular problem, and how to ensure that the quality estimated is the appropriate one for the specific purpose of the modelling exercise. Commencing with a toolbox of useful generic approaches to parameter estimation, the book deals with methods for estimating parameters for single populations. These parameters include population size, birth and death rates, and the population growth rate. For such parameters, rigorous statistical theory has been developed, and software is readily available. The problem is to select the optimal sampling design and method of analysis. The second part of the book deals with parameters that describe spatial dynamics, and ecological interactions such as competition, predation and parasitism. Here the principle problems are designing appropriate experiments and ensuring that the quantities measured by the experiments are relevant to the ecological models in which they will be used. This book will be essential reading for ecological researchers, postgraduate students and environmental managers who need to address an ecological problem through a population model. It is accessible to anyone with an understanding of basic statistical methods and population ecology.

Subfields: Ecology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9dd8575da649ae820725f1f9ae056026da42b19c

How researchers see this paper

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In Ecology

1. C. Brown
2. M. Brown
3. S. Cooke
4. C. Suski
5. Karline Soetaert
6. M. Donaldson
7. D. Armstrong
8. C. O’Connor

In Plant Science

1. Y. Buckley
2. M. Rees
3. D. Briese
4. J. Perrott
5. L. Langer
6. Johan Truvé
7. J. Roygard
8. R. Davidson

Citations in the corpus

• Demography and management of the invasive plant species Hypericum perforatum. I. Using multi‐level mixed‐effects models for characterizing growth, survival and fecundity in a long‐term data set (2003, methodology): “In order to deal with non-independence of within-plant data points (survival of a plant from year to year could be correlated), time until death of each individual is more conventionally used in survival analysis as the response variable (McCallum 2000).”
• On Improving Telemetry-Based Survival Estimation (2006, background): “…advances have improved the potential for accurate survival estimation, concern remains over bias and lack of precision in survival estimates derived specifically from ecological research (Krebs 1999, McCallum 2000, Fox 2001, Winterstein et al. 2001, Williams et al. 2002, Zens and Peart 2003).”
• Stress Indicators in Fish (2016, background): “For example, growth rates can directly influence populationmodels (Power, 2002) and bioenergetics models (Beyers et al., 2002), while fitness and survival influence demographic processes (McCallum, 2000).”
• Slowing down a pine invasion despite uncertainty in demography and dispersal (2005, methodology): “We used parametric survival analysis, substituting distance for the conventional failure time (McCallum 2000), to estimate the parameter for a negative exponential model of the distribution of distances.”
• EMPIRICAL MEASUREMENT OF PARASITE TRANSMISSION BETWEEN GROUPS IN A COLONIAL BIRD (2004, background): “Whenever transmission has been directly measured in natural host–parasite systems (reviews in Anderson and May 1991, McCallum 2000, McCallum et al. 2001, Fenton et al. 2002), it has usually been that between hosts or from vector to host within a group or population (e.g., a city, nesting colony, or…”
• The effects of cowpox virus on survival in natural rodent populations: increases and decreases (2002, background): “Although the clearest way of estimating parasite induced mortality is through field-scale experiments (McCallum 2000), the number and range of populations in which biological and practical difficulties can be overcome, and field experiments carried out, is likely to remain Correspondence: Sandra…”
• Timing and distance of natal dispersal for wild boar Sus scrofa in Sweden (2003, background): “Prediction of the rate of spread of a population usually requires data on the dispersal of in­ dividuals (McCallum 2000).”
• Size and shape of ocean margin nematodes: morphological diversity and depth-related patterns (2002, background): “Juveniles, by definition, do not reproduce, and the intrinsic growth rate of a population (density increase) is particularly sensitive to early reproduction (McCallum 2000).”
• Density-dependent population growth in a reintroduced population of North Island saddlebacks (2005, methodology): “The data used to estimate reproduction and juvenile survival were separate from those used to estimate population density, so these analyses do not suffer from the lack of independence inherent in many attempts to detect density dependence (den Boer & Reddingius 1996; Elkinton 2000; McCallum 2000).”