Modelling and estimation of pest population, Data collection and analysis in pest control, Methods for pest control, Pest management systems.

An introduction to mathematical methods used in the study of population phenomena including models of total population and population age structure, models of random population events presented in terms of Markov chains, and methods used to uncover qualitative behavior of more complicated difference equations.

This book provides an introduction to age-structured population modeling which emphasizes the connection between mathematical theory and underlying biological assumptions. Through the rigorous development of the linear theory and the nonlinear theory alongside numerics, the authors explore classical equations that describe the dynamics of certain ecological systems. Modeling aspects are discussed to show how relevant problems in the fields of demography, ecology and epidemiology can be formulated and treated within the theory. In particular, the book presents extensions of age-structured modeling to the spread of diseases and epidemics while also addressing the issue of regularity of solutions, the asymptotic behavior of solutions, and numerical approximation. With sections on transmission models, non-autonomous models and global dynamics, this book fills a gap in the literature on theoretical population dynamics. The Basic Approach to Age-Structured Population Dynamics will appeal to graduate students and researchers in mathematical biology, epidemiology and demography who are interested in the systematic presentation of relevant models and mathematical methods.

As Eugene Wigner stressed, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in the physical sciences and their technological applications. The role of mathematics in the biological, medical and social sciences has been much more modest but has recently grown thanks to the simulation capacity offered by modern computers. This book traces the history of population dynamics---a theoretical subject closely connected to genetics, ecology, epidemiology and demography---where mathematics has brought significant insights. It presents an overview of the genesis of several important themes: exponential growth, from Euler and Malthus to the Chinese one-child policy; the development of stochastic models, from Mendel's laws and the question of extinction of family names to percolation theory for the spread of epidemics, and chaotic populations, where determinism and randomness intertwine. The reader of this book will see, from a different perspective, the problems that scientists face when governments ask for reliable predictions to help control epidemics (AIDS, SARS, swine flu), manage renewable resources (fishing quotas, spread of genetically modified organisms) or anticipate demographic evolutions such as aging.

This book gives a unifying framework for estimating the abundance of open populations: populations subject to births, deaths and movement, given imperfect measurements or samples of the populations. The focus is primarily on populations of vertebrates for which dynamics are typically modelled within the framework of an annual cycle, and for which stochastic variability in the demographic processes is usually modest. Discrete-time models are developed in which animals can be assigned to discrete states such as age class, gender, maturity, population (within a metapopulation), or species (for multi-species models). The book goes well beyond estimation of abundance, allowing inference on underlying population processes such as birth or recruitment, survival and movement. This requires the formulation and fitting of population dynamics models. The resulting fitted models yield both estimates of abundance and estimates of parameters characterizing the underlying processes.