Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory is a powerful framework for the energetics of organisms over their life cycle. It explains how organisms acquire resources from their environment, and how they subsequently use them to maintain themselves, grow, develop and reproduce. A quantitative energy budget is an extremely useful tool for a wide range of scientific questions in (applied) biology. DEBkiss represents a simplified model derived from DEB theory, focussing on animal life cycles (mainly invertebrates and fish). This simplification is easy to understand, and easy to apply. However, it is still powerful enough to address the dominant features of animal's life history. A list of scientific DEBkiss applications can be found at the DEBtox information site.

This book is a reshuffled and extended version of our scientific paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. This book combines the paper and its supporting information in a different format, and I will add sub-models to this book as time goes on, as DEBkiss continues to evolve and expand. If you are new to energy budgets, and want some more background, I strongly advice you to start by reading in my e-book "Making sense of chemical stress", which can also be downloaded from Leanpub. That book provides a math-free conceptual introduction, whereas I here immediately include the math (although it is pretty basic stuff, if you are accustomed to ordinary differential equations).

Important note: This e-book's contents are not so crystallised as the "Making sense" e-book. Especially Chapter 4-5 are more reference than reading material. However, I still think it is important to make this material available at this point, and I hope to be able to polish and embellish the text in the near future. Your support by downloading/buying this book will be my motivation.

Support page at debtox.info (includes the version log)