Planting the seeds of a Tree of Death: A new approach, supporting information, test cases, and a national-scale study of population mortality structures from animal-marking records

This thesis demonstrates a new method for estimating death curves – showing how likely an individual is to live to a particular age – for wild populations of animals. The method is designed to be used on large-scale animal-marking datasets that include many species, and allows comparisons of death curves between species and between populations of the same species. The thesis includes a large-scale analysis of mortality structures for Australian bird populations, and tests ideas relating life history characters – such as body size and number of offspring per year – to differences in mortality between species.