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Download paper Released 2021-11-27

Life histories of 9,488 birds & 4,865 mammals

A new publication series on life history evolution and population dynamics in birds and mammals.

A life history model is essential for our ability to predict and explain the dynamics of a natural species, and a distribution of life history models across a larger collection of species is essential for our ability to analyse and understand evolution by natural selection. This is the principle behind a new publication series on life history evolution and population dynamics in birds and mammals.

In this first study of the series, I use more than 56,000 data-estimates of central parameters to build equilibrium life history models for 9,488 species of birds and 4,865 species of mammals, with 27 life history, energetic and ecological traits being estimated for each species.

Each species model is in an energetic balance that reconciles the resource assimilation, physiological growth, metabolism, and demographic traits of an average individual with the foraging ecology at the evolutionarily determined population dynamic equilibrium, where the natural selection of interactive competition in the overlapping areas of individual home ranges determines the abundance, biomass, and energy consumption of the population.

These species models are used in five subsequent publications to analyse and document on the importance of population dynamic feedback selection for the life history evolution and population dynamics of birds and mammals. By using data-plots extensively in the publications, instead of mathematical equations, it is my hope to make it easier to the understand and visualise the entangled mechanisms of population dynamics feedback selection.

Fig. 1 Estimator distributions across parameters for 9,488 bird and 4,865 mammal species. Estimation levels: Data (grey), genus (blue), family (green), order (yellow), and class (red).