Prologue

Summary

When a university professor retired or died, it often happens that his/her former students get together to compile a festschrift to commemorate their teacher. But, I was not a professor, just a plain research scientist of the Canadian Forestry Service. I had no students who would compile my past works. But that is a good thing after all because, in retrospect, I find that many of my early ideas were neither adequately conceived nor well presented in writing. However, over the later years of my research career, the ideas became consolidated to higher levels of clarity, coherence, and integrity, such that these would now be readily put to a practical use in the study of animal populations. Thus, when I retired from my active research career, I decided to assemble those ideas to share them with younger-generation population ecologists.