Estimation of Mortality Rates in Stage-Structured Population

1: Introduction.- 1.1 Inverse problems in population ecology.- 1.2 Copepod mortality rate estimation.- 1.3 The theoretical problems of mortality estimation.- 1.4 Existing methods for mortality estimation.- 1.5 This monograph.- 2: Mortality Estimation Schemes Related to Stage Structured Population Models.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Preliminaries: mortality estimation for an unstructured population with known birth rate.- 2.3 Mortality estimation for a single stage of known duration.- 2.4 Instabilities associated with mortality estimators.- 2.5 Discussion.- 3: Cubic Splines and Histosplines.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 A brief guide to splines.- 3.3 Cubic splines for exact or noisy histogram data.- 3.4 Choosing the smoothing parameter with covariant error terms.- 3.5 Two examples of the application of cubic area splines to age-structured population data.- 4: Population Surfaces: A New Method of Mortality Estimation.- 4.1 The structured population model.- 4.2 Preliminary estimation of population surface f(?,t).- 4.3 Characteristics of f(?,t).- 4.4 Error estimates.- 4.5 What to do about adults.- 4.6 A simpler method.- 4.7 Messy practicalities.- 4.8 Summary.- 5: Tests of the New Method.- 5.1 Parslow and Sonntag's Lag-Manly model method.- 5.2 The method of Hay, Evans and Gamble.- 5.3 Manly's (1987) method.- 5.4 Comparison and testing of the sophisticated and simplified versions of the new method.- 5.5 Discussion.- 6: Loch Ewe Copepods: Some Speculation (Written with S.J. Hay).- 6.1 The Loch Ewe mesocosm experiments.- 6.2 Stage durations.- 6.3 Modelling sampling error.- 6.4 Death rate patterns for the different copepod species in bag C2: comparison and speculation.- 7: Discussion.- 7.1 What we've done.- 7.2 Experimental suggestions.- 7.3 Production estimation.- 7.4Methodological improvements.- 7.5 The take home message.- References.