There is now considerable evidence that humans are cooperative breeders – that is, women need allomaternal support to successfully reproduce. Families play a key role in providing this support to women. Evidence from low-income contexts linking allomaternal support to beneficial child outcomes is particularly strong, but associations between support and successful reproduction are more varied in high-income settings and when fertility is the outcome. Two possible reasons for this are (1) allocare is measured in many forms and at many time points with potentially different meanings for reproductive women, and (2) highincome populations are very heterogeneous, including large socioeconomic inequalities, which may modify associations between support and fertility. This publication-based dissertation has three main objectives: (1) to contribute to cooperative breeding literature in high-income, low-fertility settings; (2) to deepen our understanding of how family support plays into reproductive decision making by testing associations between many types of support and women’s fertility; and (3) to explore contextual factors, particularly socioeconomic position, with may moderate associations between family support and women’s fertility. These objectives are investigated in four research chapters (two published and two written for submission) using secondary data from low-fertility, high-income countries. This research firstly confirms that families provide key allomaternal support for women in high-income countries, while also highlighting other sources of support. However, the results demonstrate that all support is not equal. Types, timing, and sources of support vary in terms of their influence on reproductive outcomes (e.g.in the United Kingdom, material or practical support often associates with lower fertility while non-material support associates with higher fertility). Secondly, this research demonstrates that socioeconomic environments modify many components of the reproductive decision making process, not the least of which is how families interact with and support each other and, in turn, how family support associates with fertility outcomes.

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In this thesis, we propose an innovative model based approach to the measurement and analysis of segregation. Historically, segregation has been measured using descriptive indices that provide summary measurements. We demonstrate that these indices are inherently biased. Further, they lack measures of statistical certainty, do not control for stochastic variation, are frequently aspatial, cannot cope with multiple scales and dimensions simultaneously and have no mechanism for the inclusion of explanatory models. We explore a multilevel modelling approach which remedies these issues and we argue that this approach is a more appropriate representation of the complexity of modern society. We illustrate the innovation using one of the traditional focuses of segregation research: the residential environment and analyse the changing residential segregation in England and Wales during the first decade of the twenty-first century. In these case studies we show that the residential segregation of benefits claimants has decreased during this period. Moving on to investigate the geographical inequality of mortality, we demonstrate that there is a great deal of stochastic variation in the raw data, and a further extension of the approach using a Poisson multilevel model is necessary to uncover the underlying trends. Conversely to common understanding the model reports no evidence of increasing inequality in the risk of mortality, that the highest levels of inequality were for those of working age and that the highest inequalities in the risk of mortality at the neighbourhood scales were found at the lowest end of the income scale. The final case study sets up a unique exploration of residential segregation by age, ethnicity and educational attainment in eight of the largest built up areas in the UK. We found the largest segregation was in the non-ESWI populations and those with low levels of educational attainment, along with a small decrease with age. All these findings were made possible by the flexible methodology proposed in this thesis.

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There remain a number of research gaps in the fields of Population and Community Ecology. These include gaps in our understanding of the population biology of species which exhibit complex life-cycles and life history strategies that might mitigate against environmental variability. There are also gaps in our knowledge of the interactions between newly resident species (e.g. alien species etc.) and communities in their new ranges. The establishment in Britain of two closely related and niche sharing species of alien phytophagous cynipid wasps, Andricus quercuscalicis (Burgsdorf, 1783) (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae) andA. grossulariae (Giraud, 1859) (Hymenoptera: Cynipidae) - both of which have complex life-cycles with nonoverlapping sexual and asexual generations - provide a rare opportunity to address such research gaps. While A. quercuscalicis was first recorded in the British Isles in the 1950s and has been studied extensively since, A. grossulariae established only over the last decade. In Chapter 2, The population biology of two niche sharing alien · I gal/wasps, I ask whether the arrival of A. grossulariae has caused changes in the temporal patterns of galling rates, patterns of diapause, and overwintering mortality to previous observations and fmd that there is some fluctuation in most cases. I also ask if there is now evidence of a competition effect between A. quercuscalicis and A. grossulariae in any stage of their life-cycle and find that there is suggestion of a small competition effect occurring in the sexual generation.

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