Continuous Structured Population Models for Daphnia magna.

ABSTRACT

We continue our efforts in modeling Daphnia magna, a species of water flea, by proposing a continuously structured population model incorporating density-dependent and density-independent fecundity and mortality rates. We collected new individual-level data to parameterize the individual demographics relating food availability and individual daphnid growth. Our model is fit to experimental data using the generalized least-squares framework, and we use cross-validation and Akaike Information Criteria to select hyper-parameters. We present our confidence intervals on parameter estimates.