title: COMADRE: a global data base of animal demography.
abstract: The open-data scientific philosophy is being widely adopted and proving to promote considerable progress in ecology and evolution. Open-data global data bases now exist on animal migration, species distribution, conservation status, etc. However, a gap exists for data on population dynamics spanning the rich diversity of the animal kingdom world-wide. This information is fundamental to our understanding of the conditions that have shaped variation in animal life histories and their relationships with the environment, as well as the determinants of invasion and extinction. Matrix population models (MPMs) are among the most widely used demographic tools by animal ecologists. MPMs project population dynamics based on the reproduction, survival and development of individuals in a population over their life cycle. The outputs from MPMs have direct biological interpretations, facilitating comparisons among animal species as different as Caenorhabditis elegans, Loxodonta africana and Homo sapiens. Thousands of animal demographic records exist in the form of MPMs, but they are dispersed throughout the literature, rendering comparative analyses difficult. Here, we introduce the COMADRE Animal Matrix Database, an open-data online repository, which in its version 1.0.0 contains data on 345 species world-wide, from 402 studies with a total of 1625 population projection matrices. COMADRE also contains ancillary information (e.g. ecoregion, taxonomy, biogeography, etc.) that facilitates interpretation of the numerous demographic metrics that can be derived from its MPMs. We provide R code to some of these examples.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We introduce the COMADRE Animal Matrix Database, a resource for animal demography. Its open-data nature, together with its ancillary information, will facilitate comparative analysis, as will the growing availability of databases focusing on other aspects of the rich animal diversity, and tools to query and combine them. Through future frequent updates of COMADRE, and its integration with other online resources, we encourage animal ecologists to tackle global ecological and evolutionary questions with unprecedented sample size.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.|ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Goddard building #8, St. Lucia, Qld, 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Salguero-Gómez
authors.affiliation: Max-Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.|Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.
authors.forename: Owen R
authors.initials: OR
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.|MaxNetAging School, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, DE-18057, Rostock, Germany.
authors.forename: C Ruth
authors.initials: CR
authors.lastname: Archer
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bein
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Hendrik
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: de Buhr
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Farack
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Fränce
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Gottschalk
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hartmann
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Henning
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Gabriel
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hoppe
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Gesa
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Römer
authors.affiliation: Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA.
authors.forename: Tara
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ruoff
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Veronika
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Sommer
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wille
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Jakob
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Voigt
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Zeh
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Vieregg
authors.affiliation: ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Goddard building #8, St. Lucia, Qld, 4072, Australia.|School of Natural Sciences, Zoology & Trinity Centre for Biodiversity Research, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
authors.forename: Yvonne M
authors.initials: YM
authors.lastname: Buckley
authors.affiliation: National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, 1 Park Place, Annapolis, MD, 21401, USA.
authors.forename: Judy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Che-Castaldo
authors.affiliation: Centre for Ecology and Conservation, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Exeter, TR10 9FE, UK.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hodgson
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Scheuerlein
authors.affiliation: Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, 1090 GE, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.|Biology Department MS-34, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA, 02543-1050, USA.
authors.forename: Hal
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Caswell
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Evolutionary Biodemography Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad-Zuse-Straße 1, Rostock, DE-18057, Germany.|Max-Planck Odense Center on the Biodemography of Aging, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.|Population Research Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708-0309, USA.
authors.forename: James W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Vaupel
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D016208:Databases, Factual; D003710:Demography; D004463:Ecology / Q000379:methods*; D008954:Models, Biological
keywords: animal population ecology; comparative approach; matrix population model; open-data; population growth rate (λ)
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