This technical appendix contains information on several issues related to the modelling described in Chapters 6 and 7. None of this material is essential reading for understanding the flow of results in these chapters, but it is provided for completeness. The first few sections describe the structure of the diagnostic statistics that are used to characterize the behaviour of model populations. These statistics measure the conformance between the utilization and the availability of resources, the specification of the variation in resource availability, and the degree of heterogeneity of resource use among phenotypes within populations. I also provide largely verbal descriptions of the algorithms for each of the six exploitation strategies (i.e., Ch, Rh, Sh, etc.), with comments on implementation issues. These descriptions include notes on the assumptions that are specific to each algorithm. I believe that most decisions are ecologically reasonable choices that offer the most natural way of selecting between alternatives when contentious situations arise. Unfortunately, the verbal description of relatively complex algorithms makes for rather dry reading, but short of providing a program listing consisting of 7500 lines of C or ‘pseudocode’, this is the best way to describe how the population dynamics of the different strategies function. The last part of this appendix recapitulates the main assumptions and limitations involved in the modelling techniques.

Diagnostic statistics

There are many criteria that might be used to characterize the behaviour of a modelling suite, but the key issue from a versatility standpoint is the pattern of conformance between utilization and availability through time. Other points of interest are the temporal changes in density and the rates of resource utilization.