Matrix population models (MPMs) are stage or age structured demographic models that summarise the life cycle components of survival, growth, and reproduction. Since their introduction in the 1940s, MPMs have become the most widely-used structured population model thanks to their solid mathematical foundations and clear biological interpretation of their outputs. Thousands of MPMs have been published in the ecological, evolutionary and demographic literature for hundreds of species and the COMPADRE and COMADRE database project aim to create an open-access database of these for research and teaching purposes.
The project originated with the comparative plant demography work of J. Silvertown and M. Franco in 1989 and has since grown in taxonomic scope to include animals, and in organisational scope with contributions from researchers and developers based in several institutions including here at CPOP, University of Oxford (UK), and Lincoln Park Zoo (USA). As the number of published MPMs grows, so do the opportunities to ask exciting questions about plant and animal demography, ecology, and evolution at a global and cross-taxonomic scale.
The underlying motivation behind COMPADRE and COMADRE is to:
- facilitate this research by continuing to digitize and archive MPMs in a central repository in a standardized format and
- to develop computational tools to facilitate use of the database.
Relevant research papers:
- Salguero-Gómez, R., Jones, O. R., Archer, C. R., Bein, C., de Buhr, H., Farack, C., … Vaupel, J. W. (2016). COMADRE: a global database of animal demography. The Journal of Animal Ecology, 85(2), 371–384. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2656.12482
- Salguero-Gómez, R., Jones, O. R., Archer, C. R., Buckley, Y. M., Che-Castaldo, J., Caswell, H., … Vaupel, J. W. (2015). The COMPADRE Plant Matrix Database: an open online repository for plant demography. The Journal of Ecology, 103(1), 202–218. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2745.12334
You can find the COMPADRE website here