The book is based on data collected during the past 10 years by Zackenberg Ecological Research Operations (ZERO) at Zackenberg Research Station in northeast Greenland. This volume covers the function of Arctic ecosystems based on the most comprehensive long-term data set in the world from a well-defined Arctic ecosystem. Editors offer a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of how climate variability is influencing an Arctic ecosystem and how the Arctic ecosystems have inherent feedback mechanisms interacting with climate variability or change.
* The latest research on the functioning of Arctic ecosystems
* Supplements current books on Arctic climate impact assessment as a case study for ecological specialists
* Discusses the complex perpetuating effects on Earth
* Vital information on modeling ecosystem responses to understand future climates

In the summer of 1993, twenty-six graduate and postdoctoral stu dents and fourteen lecturers converged on Cornell University for a summer school devoted to structured-population models. This school was one of a series to address concepts cutting across the traditional boundaries separating terrestrial, marine, and freshwa ter ecology. Earlier schools resulted in the books Patch Dynamics (S. A. Levin, T. M. Powell & J. H. Steele, eds., Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1993) and Ecological Time Series (T. M. Powell & J. H. Steele, eds., Chapman and Hall, New York, 1995); a book on food webs is in preparation. Models of population structure (differences among individuals due to age, size, developmental stage, spatial location, or genotype) have an important place in studies of all three kinds of ecosystem. In choosing the participants and lecturers for the school, we se lected for diversity-biologists who knew some mathematics and mathematicians who knew some biology, field biologists sobered by encounters with messy data and theoreticians intoxicated by the elegance of the underlying mathematics, people concerned with long-term evolutionary problems and people concerned with the acute crises of conservation biology. For four weeks, these perspec tives swirled in discussions that started in the lecture hall and carried on into the sweltering Ithaca night. Diversity mayor may not increase stability, but it surely makes things interesting."

This open access book shows how to use sensitivity analysis in demography. It presents new methods for individuals, cohorts, and populations, with applications to humans, other animals, and plants. The analyses are based on matrix formulations of age-classified, stage-classified, and multistate population models. Methods are presented for linear and nonlinear, deterministic and stochastic, and time-invariant and time-varying cases. Readers will discover results on the sensitivity of statistics of longevity, life disparity, occupancy times, the net reproductive rate, and statistics of Markov chain models in demography. They will also see applications of sensitivity analysis to population growth rates, stable population structures, reproductive value, equilibria under immigration and nonlinearity, and population cycles. Individual stochasticity is a theme throughout, with a focus that goes beyond expected values to include variances in demographic outcomes. The calculations are easily and accurately implemented in matrix-oriented programming languages such as Matlab or R. Sensitivity analysis will help readers create models to predict the effect of future changes, to evaluate policy effects, and to identify possible evolutionary responses to the environment. Complete with many examples of the application, the book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in human demography and population biology. The material will also appeal to those in mathematical biology and applied mathematics.

ButIacceptedtheinvitation.Key?tz'ssuggestionthatweincorporatesome of my earlier work on matrix population models seemed like a good way to complement the methods presented in the book, and to expand the range of their applications. I am a demographer of plants and nonhuman animals. Some would call this an oxymoron, since the Greek rootdemos refers to people, and that's us. But there are precedents for taking more inclusive de?nitions of the Greek.Ecologyandeconomics, forexample, bothcomefromtherootoikos, referring to the household. Interpretingdemos as referring to individuals, whether they are persons or not, lets demography apply across species. There is a long tradition of such crossover. Alfred J. Lotka is acknowledged as a founding father of both demography and ecology. Raymond Pearl used demographic methods to analyze the e?ects of toxic substances and cro- ing on fruit ?ies. Lee (1987) compared the density-dependence of the vital rates of human and non-human animals. Today, in studies of senescence, reproduction, and individual heterogeneity, the boundaries between animal and human studies are becoming increasingly blurred (Wachter et al. 1997, Carey 2003, Wachter and Bulatao 2003, Carey and Tuljapurkar 2003).

The third edition of this classic text maintains its focus on applications of demographic models, while extending its scope to matrix models for stage-classified populations. The authors first introduce the life table to describe age-specific mortality, and then use it to develop theory for stable populations and the rate of population increase. This theory is then revisited in the context of matrix models, for stage-classified as well as age-classified populations. Reproductive value and the stable equivalent population are introduced in both contexts, and Markov chain methods are presented to describe the movement of individuals through the life cycle. Applications of mathematical demography to population projection and forecasting, kinship, microdemography, heterogeneity, and multi-state models are considered.

The new edition maintains and extends the book's focus on the consequences of changes in the vital rates. Methods are presented for calculating the sensitivity and elasticity of population growth rate, life expectancy, stable stage distribution, and reproductive value, and for applying those results in comparative studies.

Stage-classified models are important in both human demography and population ecology, and this edition features examples from both human and non-human populations. In short, this third edition enlarges considerably the scope and power of demography. It will be an essential resource for students and researchers in demography and in animal and plant population ecology.

From the reviews:

"If you found the original editions...to be excellent (and who amoung us has not?) then you will find the new edition to be equally so...This book is highly andunreservedly recommended for any beginning mathematical demographer." Mathematical Population Studies, 12: 223-228, 2005

"The material in the second edition is retained, although the chapters are reorganized and references are updated. New chapters focusing on matrix population models are seamlessly interwoven with the second edition chapters, resulting in a thorough and comprehensive treatment of human, animal, and nonhuman demography." Journal of the American Statistical Association, December 2005

This book provides a complete treatment of matrix population models and their applications in ecology and demography. It is written for graduate students and researchers in ecology, population biology, conservation biology and human demography.