Table 1.

A limited list of the advantages and disadvantages of LDMs compared with ABMs in addressing questions in different subfields of ecology.

	LDM		ABM
Subfield	Advantage	Disadvantage	Advantage	Disadvantage
Demography	Stable stage-structure theory	Individual traits averaged	Relevant individual traits maintained	Lack of coherent theory
Disease Ecology	Coherent invasion and burnout theory	Limited account of superspreaders and variation in susceptibility	Unlimited account of variation in transmission and susceptibility	Difficult to generalize among diseases
Movement Ecology	Provides highly aggregated overview of population movement	Cannot account for movement at fine spatio-temporal scales	Can relate fine scale movements to local landscape factors	Theory of scaling up individual movements to population level needed
Behavioral Ecology	Simple fitness maximization theories possible: e.g. optimal foraging	Ignores fact that behavior is often highly heterogeneous at the individual level	Can account for heterogeneity of behavior at the individual level	More care is needed to handle the complexity of fitness maximizing theories
Trophic Ecology	Allows first order effects (averages) to be clearly assessed	Variation in resources available to individuals largely ignored	Critical effects due resource variation can be incorporated	Enormity of computations may be overwhelming if not handled carefully
Evolutionary Ecology	Well developed gene-for-trait and coalescence theory models exists	Links between genetic and ecological heterogeneity hard to make	Easy to link genetic and ecological heterogeneity	Hard to characterize emergent properties and processes responsible for speciation