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Recent papers by Trevor Branch (http://www.pnas.org/content/114/12/3252.abstract) and Steven Carpenter (http://limnology.wisc.edu/blog/when-it-comes-to-biological-extremes-expect-the-unexpected/)

I got an idea about the questions at the end of each chapter. Again, this is the educator in me and taking into consideration that a student outside of your class or a professor outside UNL might like to use your book to teach his class. So I though we might have three types of questions at the end of each chapter. At least we could aim to have two types of questions. This idea came from Bloom's Taxonomy or even Marzano's too. Not sure about the names but it's just to give you an idea.

1. Comprehension: these types of questions aim to just help students assess their level of reading comprehension of concepts and ideas from a particular chapter.
2. Analysis: these types of questions will help students integrate the knowledge attained in this chapter and analyse it differently or integrate it in other scenarios. Generalization.
3. Problem solving: exercises where they need to estimate parameters, solve problems, etc.

I'll incorporate some suggestions in the first three chapters so you can get an idea of how it would look like in case you like the idea.

Oh I forgot to say that they'd be different from the bold parts you include in each chapter.

I think citations are not being treated properly, need to double check installation of bibtex etc and rerun bookdown.

They used aerial counts to estimate elephants population size and used an age-structured population model.
We can use it as an example in one of the chapters or in your class.
aerial counts elephants.pdf

So I was thinking about adding a preface to the book. One for educators who wish to use this book to teach and one for students who wish to use this book to learn about demography, either because they are in your class (or another professors’) or because they found the book and want to learn by themselves.

This will sort of guide them through how to use this book, what they can expect to learn, how to take advantage of the content and examples, how to best solve the exercises, etc.

Also like what is your philosophy as an educator in how to use this book.

We can develop these ideas more as we progress with the revision but I thought I better start the conversation here.

I believe that it's a good idea to include an example in Chapter 1 after you start talking about "Where things get interesting...". You mention that things get interesting when N depends on the abundance of other species. That this is one of the things that make population dynamics very interesting (I agree!). So an example that shows exactly this, without looking at the model. Just showing how the N of one species affects the N of another species is an easy concept that can make this "abstract" idea more concrete. The abundance of seals affects the abundance of sea otters. The students are not supposed to read anything more than just that.

Should we include an appendix with solutions to the exercises for each chapter?

Should each chapter start with a list of learning objectives?

self-explanatory