Accounting for Age Structure and Spatial Structure in Eco-Evolutionary Analyses of a Large, Mobile Vertebrate.

The idealized concept of a population is integral to ecology, evolutionary biology, and natural resource management. To make analyses tractable, most models adopt simplifying assumptions, which almost inevitably are violated by real species in nature. Here, we focus on both demographic and genetic estimates of effective population size per generation (Ne), the effective number of breeders per year (Nb), and Wright's neighborhood size (NS) for black bears (Ursus americanus) that are continuously distributed in the northern lower peninsula of Michigan, United States.