Applied Demography for Biologists

This is the first book to comprehensively apply the fundamental tools and concepts of demography to a nonhuman species. It provides clear and concise treatment of standard demographic techniques such as life table analysis and population projection; introduces models that have seldom appeared outside of the demographic literature including the multiple decrement life table, the intrinsic sex ratio, and multiregional demography; and addresses demographic problems that are unique to nonhuman organisms such as the demographic theory of social insects and harvesting techniques applied to insect mass rearing. The book also contains a synthesis of fundamental properties of population such as momentum and convergence to the stable age distribution, with a section on the unity of demographic models, and appendices detailing analytical methods used to quantify and model the data gathered in a ground-breaking study on the mortality experience of 1.2 million medflies. Based on an insect demography course at the University of California, Davis, the book is intended for practicing entomologists, population biologists, and ecologists for use in research or as a graduate text.

James R. Carey is Professor of Entomology at the University of California, Davis and member of the Graduate Group in Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Carey is recognized nationally and internationally as a leading expert in arthropod demography and has authored nearly 50 publications in this area including papers in Science, Theoretical Population Biology, Occologia, Journal of Animal Ecology and numerous entomology journals. He is Principle Investigator of a 4-year study funded by the National Institute of Aging to gather and analyze data for the largest life table ever constructed for a non-human organism.