Tree Life Tables

ife tables, also called mortality tables, have fascinated demographers and population biologists since antiquity. In part, the fascination lies in the tables' engaging simplicity. From a few bits of information, it is possible to encapsulate the life history and ecological role of organisms in natural communities, as well as project future population sizes and age structures. In its simplest form, a life table lists birth and death rates for each age class or size class in a population. For trees, the life table also commonly contains the rate at which individuals advance from one size class to another (Table 1). Life tables are of intrinsic interest to the evolutionary biologist who seeks to explain differences in lifehistory patterns in terms of selective forces and mechanisms (Caswell 1982a,b). They are an essential tool of the population biologist who must know the demographic mechanisms responsible for changes in population size. They interest community ecologists, especially those attempting to model forest dynamics (Shugart 1984, 1987). Birth, death, and growth equations in any model must be consistent with the biological reality of the life-table data. Life tables are also of practical use to foresters (Buongiorno and Michie

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