Population stage structure is fundamental to ecology, and models of this structure have proven useful in many different systems. Many ecological variables other than stage, such as habitat type, site occupancy and metapopulation status are also modelled using transitions among discrete states. Transitions among life stages can be characterised by the distribution of time spent in each stage, including the mean and variance of...

Complex population processes may require equally complex models, which can lead to analytically intractable estimation problems. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) is a computational tool for parameter estimation in situations where likelihoods cannot be computed. Instead of using likelihoods, ABC methods quantify the similarities between an observed data set and repeated simulations from a model. A practical obstacle to i...