I am looking for a software (preferably freeware) that can be used for estimating uncertainty of population growth rate calculated from life table data for small invertebrates. Has to be something relatively simple/intuitive and usable in teaching...
Any suggestion is appreciated,
/Elena
Hi Elena, I doubt there's a truly simple answer to your question, but one thing you could try is to install the free Poptools add-in for Excel (http://www.poptools.org/). It will let you answer lots of different population dynamics questions. You could get to the same place using R (which is free) but the students would have to be able/willing to code. There are free clones of Matlab such as FreeMat (http://freemat.sourceforge.net/) and Octave (https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/) that will let students copy examples written in Matlab (for example in Caswell's book on matrix models). These will all give you free ways to work out what the uncertainty in growth rates is, based on your data.
You can use the following packages of the R program:
Stubben, C., & Milligan, B. (2007). Estimating and analyzing demographic models using the popbio package in R. Journal of Statistical Software, 22(11), 1-23.
Stott, I., Hodgson, D. J., & Townley, S. (2012). popdemo: an R package for population demography using projection matrix analysis. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 3(5), 797-802.
Nenzén, H. K., Swab, R. M., Keith, D. A., & Araújo, M. B. (2012). demoniche–an R‐package for simulating spatially‐explicit population dynamics. Ecography, 35(7), 577-580.
Yes, thank you!
popdemo I has already found, but the other two are new to me:) Will try. The challenge is to make it feasible for the students with little knowledge of R to use it for analysing their data.
best/Elena
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