Plant phenology, migration and geographical variation in body weight of a large herbivore: the effect of a variable topography

Statistics is a subject of many uses and surprisingly few effective practitioners. The traditional road to statistical knowledge is blocked, for most, by a formidable wall of mathematics. The approach in An Introduction to the Bootstrap avoids that wall. It arms scientists and engineers, as well as statisticians, with the computational techniques they need to analyze and understand complicated data sets.

Recently, the results from several long-term individual-based population studies of ungulates have been published. One major conclusion is that the population dynamics of ungulates in predator-free environments is strongly influenced by a combination of stochastic variation in the environment, and population density. Both density dependence and environmental stochasticity operate through changes in life history traits, correlated with variation in body weight. This generates delays in the response of the population to changes in environment. In the absence of predation, a stable equilibrium is therefore unlikely to exist between an ungulate population and its food resources. This thorough understanding of the mechanisms generating population fluctuations suggests that studies of ungulates will provide an important source for examining effects of long-term changes in the environment, for instance, resulting from a climatic change.