Recent progress in discrete population dynamics Original Research Article

The purpose of this lecture is to display recent results concerning the relation between discrete, continuous, and data-based population models. The lecture is organized as follows: (1) we begin by motivating why discrete models are used, under what circumstances, and for what purposes. (2) It is not obvious how discrete models should be derived and we show how discrete models are derived in our case. (3) We continue by discussing the relation between continuous and discrete models and their dynamical analogies. (4) We end up by discussing possible problems that appear as models fitted to data are used for making conclusions regarding its long-term behavior.