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.
