From lions, to lion’s manes, to dandelions: How different types of demographic data and methods are selected and why

The three pillars upon which this book has been engineered are the diversity of demographic schedules found in nature, coupled with the common currencies of demography and the myriad of existing quantitative methods in demography. These pillars are present along the book and its 22 chapters in the following aspects: We realised that there was an empty niche in trying to bring together Demographic Methods across the Tree of Life. This was the initial aim of this book! Later, the beginnings of this book were developed via frequent conversations between us and with all of the contributing authors, as well as rigorous peer-reviewing, to make sure that our primary motivation was fulfilled: To provide a cohesive book that brings together field ecologists, ecological modellers, and practitioners working with animal and plant kingdoms. To reach this goal, the book is divided into three parts: Demographic data collection (Part I), demographic analyses (Part II), and demographic applications (Part III). This phase of growth/development took some years and luckily ended with the birth of this book. We will do our best to slow down the inevitable decline of performance with increasing ages (but see Jones et al. 2014) by maintaining a repository containing the materials linked to this book to prevent it from becoming outdated. We now hope that this book’s reproductive output will be high with the recruitment of the next generation of demographers, where questions, methods, and systems will not be siloed taxonomically or biogeographically.