An authoritative overview of the concepts and applications of biological demography This book provides a comprehensive introduction to biodemography, an exciting interdisciplinary field that unites the natural science of biology with the social science of human demography. Biodemography is an essential resource for demographers, epidemiologists, gerontologists, and health professionals as well as ecologists, population biologists, entomologists, and conservation biologists. This accessible and innovative book is also ideal for the classroom. James Carey and Deborah Roach cover everything from baseline demographic concepts to biodemographic applications, and present models and equations in discrete rather than continuous form to enhance mathematical accessibility. They use a wealth of real-world examples that draw from data sets on both human and nonhuman species and offer an interdisciplinary approach to demography like no other, with topics ranging from kinship theory and family demography to reliability engineering, tort law, and demographic disasters such as the Titanic and the destruction of Napoleon's Grande Armee. Provides the first synthesis of demography and biology Covers baseline demographic models and concepts such as Lexis diagrams, mortality, fecundity, and population theory Features in-depth discussions of biodemographic applications like harvesting theory and mark-recapture Draws from data sets on species ranging from fruit flies and plants to elephants and humans Uses a uniquely interdisciplinary approach to demography, bringing together a diverse range of concepts, models, and applications Includes informative "biodemographic shorts," appendixes on data visualization and management, and more than 150 illustrations of models and equations

These are the proceedings of an Advanced Research Workshop (ARW), sponsored by the NATO Science Panel, entitled "Pest Control: Operations and Systems Analysis in Fruit Fly Management." The ARW was held in Bad Windsheim, Germany during the week of 5 August 1985. The purpose of the ARW was to bring together scientists who are interested in fruit fly problems, but who usually do not have an opportunity to speak with each other, for an intense week of interdisciplinary collaboration. In particular, the group present at the ARW contained a mix of biologists, field ecologists, mathematical modellers, operational program managers, economists and social scientists. Each group has its own professional meetings at which fruit fly problems are discussed, but the point of the ARW was to learn about the problem from the perspective of other fields, which are equally important for the ultimate management of the fruit fly problems. (A list of attendees follows this preface. ) It appears that the ARW successfully met its objective of bringing together a group for interdisciplinary considerations of the problems; I hope that the proceedings do as well. The ARW was structured with formal lectures in the mornings and workshops in the afternoons. For the morning lectures, four different topics were chosen: 1) basic biology and ecology, 2) trapping and detection, 3) control and eradication, and 4) policy issues. Each morning, one lecture from each area was presented.

"Jim Carey's fine monograph is the first single-authored exposition on the 'the biodemography of aging' This important new trans-disciplinary subject seeks to explain the actuarial trends of aging at all levels of biological mechanisms. Carey draws heavily from his pioneering studies of medflies that, like humans, show declining mortality rates at later ages. His medfly gerotron continues to generate challenging mysteries, such as the bimodal mortality pattern of infertile flies. The book is rich in its clear expositions of complex questions in aging and well-designed illustrations, which I predict will give it a long shelf life."--Caleb E. Finch, ARCO Professor in the Neurobiology of Aging, University of Southern California

"This is an important book. It provides a timely critical account of a fundamental body of work on aging and sets the stage for a new set of paradigms about senescence generally and human aging in particular, taking the first serious look at this development."--Shripad Tuljapurkar, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley

"In this book, James Carey summarizes about a dozen years of his work on medfly demography and its implications. The overarching themes are important and innovative. And the careful attention to detail, both biological and statistical, is excellent."--Marc Mangel, University of California, Santa Cruz

""Longevity" synthesizes a huge body of data collected over a long period of time, making this work unquestionably without parallel. Furthermore, "Longevity" is an exceptionally well-written and thoroughly analyzed treatise on some of the most important general questions in biodemography."--Thomas B. L. Kirkwood

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.