Variation in organismal development is ubiquitous in nature but omitted from most age‐ and stage‐structured population models. I give a general approach for formulating and analyzing its role in density‐independent population models using the framework of integral projection models. The approach allows flexible assumptions, including correlated development times among multiple life stages. I give a new Monte Carlo numerical in...

A central problem in population ecology is to use time series data to estimate the form of density dependence in the per capita growth rate (pgr). This is often accomplished with phenomenological models such as the theta‐Ricker or generalized Beverton‐Holt. Using the theta‐Ricker model as a simple but flexible description of density dependence, we apply theory and simulations to show how multimodality and ridges in the likelih...