Generation Time in Structured Populations.

Generation Time in Structured Populations.
Am Nat. 2018 Jul;192(1):105-110
Authors: Ellner SP
Abstract
Generation time is an intuitively simple concept, but for structured populations there are multiple definitions and no general understanding of how they relate to each other. François Bienvenu and Stéphane Legendre, in their note "A New Approach to the Generation Time in Matrix Population Models," appearing in the June 2015 issue of The American Naturalist, introduced a new measure of generation time Ta, the average time between birth events in an ancestral lineage, and derived the remarkably simple formula [Formula: see text] for any matrix model, where F is the fecundity matrix, v is reproductive value, and w is stable population structure. Here I generalize their formula and interpretations of Ta to a continuous or continuous-discrete population structure and derive similar formulas for three other established generation time measures: average parent age across all births at one time ([Formula: see text]) and mean parent age at birth events for a cohort (μ1) or generation (Tc). The new formulas reveal that these differently defined measures are unexpectedly often identical in value and clarify when they differ.
PMID: 29897800 [PubMed - in process]

Source: The American Naturalist - June 15, 2018 Category: Biology Authors: Ellner SP Tags: Am Nat Source Type: research