Matthieu Lesnoff & Renaud Lancelot 
Calculation of Demographic Parameters in Tropical Livestock Herds [PDF ebook] 
A discrete time approach with LASER animal-based monitoring data

1. Introduction.- 1.1. Background and objectives.- 1.2. Animal-based monitoring.- 1.3. A selection of parameters.- 1.4. Organization of the handbook.- 2. Grouping demographic data.- 2.1. Cohort splitting.- 2.2. Pseudo-cohort splitting.- 3. Mortality and offtake rates.- 3.1. One type of removal.- 3.2. Case with two types of removal.- 3.3. Additional points.- 4. Other demographic rates.- 4.1. Reproduction rates.- 4.2. Synthetic rates.- 4.3. Global demographic rates.- 5. Package laserdemog.- 5.1. R software.- 5.2. Functions in laserdemog.- 5.3. Additional points.- 6. Numerical examples.- 6.1. Example 1 – Overall description.- 6.2. Example 2 – More on reproduction rates.- 6.3. Example 3 – Test of a treatment on mortality.- 7. Annexes.- 7.1. Rates p and h in survival analyses.- 7.2. R materials.- 7.3. Structure of tables generated by hsplit and vsplit.- 8. Bibliography.

Matthieu Lesnoff is a biometrician at CIRAD. He specializes in modelling tropical livestock demography.
Renaud Lancelot is an epidemiologist at CIRAD, with extensive field experience in Africa. He currently coordinates the European EDENext research project on vector-borne diseases.
Charles-Henri Moulin is an animal scientist and professor at Montpellier Sup Agro. He specializes in livestock farming systems analysis in Mediterranean (France, Morocco) and tropical (Senegal, Mali, Brazil) areas.
Samir Messad is a biometrician at CIRAD with long experience in tropical livestock data management and analysis.
Xavier Juanès is a computer scientist at CIRAD. He has developed the LASER software and many other information systems for managing tropical livestock data.
Christian Sahut is a computer scientist at CIRAD, specializing in Web platform development.