Demography beyond the population

Abstract

Summary1. Population ecology, the discipline that studies the dynamics of species' populations and how they interact with the environment, has been one of the most prolific fields of ecology and evolution. Demographic research is central to quantifying population-level processes and their underlying mechanisms and has provided critical contributions to a diversity of research fields. Examples include the spread of infectious diseases, eco-evolutionary dynamics and rapid evolution, mechanisms underlying invasions and extinctions, and forest productivity. As the fates of individual organisms are influenced by, and subsequently underlie, many other patterns and processes, we suggest that connecting demography beyond the population level offers promising avenues of innovation in ecology and evolution. 2. Under the premise that population-level processes are an ideal common currency within ecology and evolution, we organized the British Ecological Society Symposium, Demography Beyond the Population. This event attracted international researchers who are applying demographic theory and approaches to a broad range of questions. This special feature builds off of the symposium and illustrates the ability of demography to connect across diverse research areas in ecology and evolution, including functional traits, transient dynamics, quantitative genetics, environmental drivers and feedbacks, land management and other topics. In addition to highlighting the contributed manuscripts, this editorial provides a brief background on the development of the discipline and suggests how demographic tools may be used in novel ways to study more than just populations. 3. Synthesis. This special feature integrates novel lines of research in the vast field of demography that directly interact with other ecological and evolutionary disciplines. The cross-disciplinary potential of demography is further emphasized by the fact that its 20 manuscripts are spread across all six journals of the British Ecological Society. Together, these articles highlight that there is much to be gained by linking demography to other disciplines and scales in ecology and evolution.

Environmental drivers of demographic variation across the global geographical range of 26 plant species

“…; Griffith et al . ). Given this lack of demographic data, it is not surprising that many studies resorted to other ways of inferring large‐scale variation in species’ performance.…”

Contrasting effects of spatial heterogeneity and environmental stochasticity on population dynamics of a perennial wildflower

“…, Griffith et al . ). In the past few decades, it has also become apparent that confounding spatial and temporal variation with each other, or with observation and estimation error, can lead to inappropriate inferences about ecological processes (Clark ).…”

The long and winding road of evolutionary demography: preface

“…Evolutionary demography provides a more fundamental assessment not only of the life history of a species, but can also be extended to explain population and community dynamics (Griffith et al 2016), and even the evolutionary origins of species (Shefferson and SalgueroGómez 2015). Metcalf and Pavard (2007) reasoned that, "Evolution is driven by the propagation of genes, traits….…”

“…To this end, two large-scale databases of plant and animal life history are now available online, the COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database and the COMADRE Animal Matrix Database, which include 4246 population projection matrices from 695 plant species (version 4.0.1), and 1625 projection matrices from 345 animal species (version 1.0.0), respectively , 2016. The British Ecological Society has even published a joint special feature dealing with this topic across six of their journals in 2015 and 2016 (Griffith et al 2016). We are now in a revolutionary era in the demographic research of plant and animal populations (including human populations).…”