TY - JOUR T1 - COMADRE: a global database of animal demography JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/027821 SP - 027821 AU - Roberto Salguero-Gómez AU - Owen R. Jones AU - C. Ruth Archer AU - Christoph Bein AU - Hendrik de Buhr AU - Claudia Farack AU - Fränce Gottschalk AU - Alexander Hartmann AU - Anne Henning AU - Gabriel Hoppe AU - Gesa Römer AU - Tara Ruoff AU - Veronika Sommer AU - Julia Wille AU - Jakob Voigt AU - Stefan Zeh AU - Dirk Vieregg AU - Yvonne M. Buckley AU - Judy Che-Castaldo AU - David Hodgson AU - Alexander Scheuerlein AU - Hal Caswell AU - James W. Vaupel Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/09/29/027821.abstract N2 - The open-access scientific philosophy has been widely adopted and proven to promote considerable progress in the fields of ecology and evolution. Openaccess global databases now exist on animal migration, the distribution of species, and conservation status, to mention a few. However, a gap exists for databases on population dynamics spanning the rich diversity of the animal kingdom. This information is fundamental to our understanding of the conditions that have shaped variation in animal life histories and their relationships with the environment. Furthermore, an animal population’s schedules of reproduction and mortality determine its invasive potential, and its risk of local extinction, which are at the core of conservation biology.Matrix population models (MPMs) are among the most widely used demographic tools by animal ecologists. MPMs project population dynamics in terms of reproduction, mortality, and development over the entire life cycle. The results of MPMs have direct biological interpretations, facilitating comparisons among animal species as different as Caenorhabditis elegans, Loxodonta africana and Homo sapiens.Thousand of animal demographic records exist in the form of MPMs, but they are dispersed throughout the literature, rendering comparative analyses difficult. Here, we introduce the COMADRE Animal Matrix Database version 1.0.0, an open-source online repository containing data on 402 species worldwide, from 272 studies, with a total of 1,575 population projection matrices. COMADRE also contains ancillary information (e.g. ecoregion, taxonomy, biogeography, etc.) that facilitates interpretation of the numerous demographic metrics that can be derived from its MPMs.Synthesis: We introduce the COMADRE Animal Matrix Database, a resource for animal demography. The open access nature of this database, together with its ancillary information will facilitate comparative analysis, as will the growing availability of databases focusing on other traits, and tools to query and combine them. Through future frequent updates of COMADRE, and its integration with other online resources, we encourage animal ecologists to tackle global ecological and evolutionary questions with unprecedented statistical power. ER -