3. Life Tables
What will you learn in this lecture:
- The difference between latitudinal and longitudinal demographic data.
- Ability to construct a life table, calculate age-specific life expectancies and estimate a population’s doubling time.
- To know how to construct population pyramid diagrams and be able to use them to interpret events which have influenced population structure.
- Ability to roughly predict future trajectory using population pyramids.
Enrolled students of fall 2024 should watch this lecture before September 24.
What questions should you be able to answer now?
- What types of demographic data can we use in a study? Where can we get them?
- Sometimes the data we get is not full, or we miss some information. How can we overcome that?
- How can we finish life table from different given variables (lx, ex)?
- What can we predict from a life table?
- What influences the shape of a population pyramid diagram and how does it look like in different environments or after different events?
Data and Instructions for Training
We heartily recommend you to practice creation of the life tables. Not surprisingly - graveyards are great location for data collection for human demography studies. If you are in a bit of goth mood, you are free to visit some of them and collect the data by yourself based on the instructions in the instructions document. However, if you are not, we provide you data already collected at the cemeteries of Wisconsin.
If you are taking the Fundamentals of Ecology course at Masaryk University, be aware that construction of life table is one of tasks in the exams. If not, we still encourage you to create the tables as practice makes masters.
Useful links and materials:
Chapter 8 in: Krebs, Charles J. Ecology: The Experimental Analysis of Distribution and Abundance.
Featured image: Unlike Jack Skellington, you now know how to predict different life variables from a graveyard data. Painting by DerickTsai (Deviant Art) based on Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas.