Dealing with death data: individual hazards, mortality and bias

In ecology and evolution, we have barely begun to tap the information available in survival data. Who lives or dies, and why, is a large part of natural selection. In ecology, these are key questions for building better individual-based models of population and community dynamics. Powerful analytical tools exist to answer them, but the literature is scattered across disciplines, and its relevance is often obscured by inconsistent terminology and technical presentation. Here, we evaluate methods for the application of such tools to ecology and evolution. Analyses based on individual hazards of death are particularly promising, especially in combination with improvements in sampling design. The same methods can also reduce the largely unrecognized biases that plague population-level estimates of mortality rates.