Abstract
Heterogeneity is a pervasive problem for analyses in biology and related fields in which it is of interest to get information unbiased by a change in the composition of the population. I show here how a reformulation of the Price equation leads to a decomposition method to address this issue. The derived equation gives the exact contributions of the average change in the surviving individuals and the change due to selective disappearance to the aggregate population change.
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Acknowledgments
I thank J.W. Vaupel, T. Coulson, J. Oeppen, J. Gampe, Z. Zhang, and V. Canudas-Romo for discussion during the derivation of the equation. I am grateful to J.W. Vaupel and T. Coulson for their comments on the manuscript. I am also grateful to P.H. Becker and his group for collecting and providing the Common Tern data set for my example (with funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BE 916/8) for the data collection since 1992). I further thank J.-M. Gaillard and an anonymous reviewer for their suggestions during the reviewing process which considerably improved the article. This research was supported by the Max Planck Society.
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Communicated by M. Schaub.
This paper is submitted as part of the proceedings of the EURING analytical meeting 2009 in Pescara.
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Rebke, M. From the Price equation to a decomposition of population change. J Ornithol 152 (Suppl 2), 555–559 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-010-0589-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-010-0589-6