Demography and Heterogeneous Data: New Approaches to Ecological Process Models

The proposed research concentrates on developing new statistical techniques, which will be primarily applied to the area of statistical ecology. These will include the construction of ecological process models that describe the population over timeand the development of computationally efficient algorithms, within the framework of model discrimination. Modelling issues of particular focus will include the introduction of heterogeneity into the model, and dealing with missing individualvalues that are important in describing the system. Real data sets will be analysed, with primary focus on the UK grey seal population, which is a rich, but extremely complex dataset.