Authors
Cory Merow, Johan P Dahlgren, C Jessica E Metcalf, Dylan Z Childs, Margaret EK Evans, Eelke Jongejans, Sydne Record, Mark Rees, Roberto Salguero‐Gómez, Sean M McMahon
Publication date
2014/2
Source
Methods in Ecology and Evolution
Volume
5
Issue
2
Pages
99-110
Description
- Integral projection models (IPMs) use information on how an individual's state influences its vital rates – survival, growth and reproduction – to make population projections. IPMs are constructed from regression models predicting vital rates from state variables (e.g. size or age) and covariates (e.g. environment). By combining regressions of vital rates, an IPM provides mechanistic insight into emergent ecological patterns such as population dynamics, species geographic distributions or life‐history strategies.
- Here, we review important resources for building IPMs and provide a comprehensive guide, with extensive R code, for their construction. IPMs can be applied to any stage‐structured population; here, we illustrate IPMs for a series of plant life histories of increasing complexity and biological realism, highlighting the utility of various regression methods for capturing biological patterns. We also present case …
Scholar articles
C Merow, JP Dahlgren, CJE Metcalf, DZ Childs… - Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 2014