Mathematical Modeling of Population

[CaptainADHD]

This is a bit of a general question, but does anyone happen to know a good book, resource, or author in the field of accurate population growth and decline modeling?

I'd like to find a good academic (non-website) source to get a general idea of the main things a population ecologist looks at when predicting growth and decline.

 

[Office_Shredder]

What parameters do you have? I recall doing some differential equations regarding a population of predators and a population of prey (the idea was that as the prey population increases the predator population grows faster, and as the predator population increases, the prey population decreases faster). Is that the kind of thing you're looking for? Or something focusing on just a particular species, like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

 

[CaptainADHD]

What parameters do you have? I recall doing some differential equations regarding a population of predators and a population of prey (the idea was that as the prey population increases the predator population grows faster, and as the predator population increases, the prey population decreases faster). Is that the kind of thing you're looking for? Or something focusing on just a particular species, like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

sounds crazy, but I'm doing a range of probabilities for the age of the matrix (yes, the movie) based upon 6 cycles of a 16 female 8 male population increasing to 250,000 and restarting. My upper and lower limits of time are determined by story, while the undefined population growth periods will be determined by estimations on family size, age of mothers, diet, loss due to war, and immigration due to a separate group of humans freed from the matrix on it's own increasing and independent scale from standard growth.

what i really need is how a professional applied mathematician accounts for all the limiting and increasing factors that more or less always play into real calculations of human population growth. i don't know how to set up a sequence with such a huge number of constantly changing growth coefficients.