The 5th International Conference on Mathematical Modelling and Analysis of Populations in Biology (ICMA-V) was held at the University of Western Ontario on December 2-4, 2015. This conference series started in 2007 at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the ICMA-V was the first in this series that was held outside the United States. It attracted more than 120 participants from the USA, Canada, UK, France, Japan, Hungary and China (including Taiwan). There were six plenary talks including the first JBD Lord Robert May Best Paper Award talk by Dr. Gail Wolkowicz; the other five plenary speakers were Michael Doebeli (University of British Columbia), Natalia Komorova (University of California-Irvine), Sebastian Schreiber (University of California at Davis), Hal Smith (Arizona State University) and Jianhong Wu (York University). There were also eighty-four, thirty-minute talks and nine posters. The conference was very successful, with record breaking numbers in both participants and talks.
This special issue in the Journal of Biological Dynamics consists of ten papers submitted by participants of ICMA-V. All submissions have gone through a regular peer review process leading to the acceptance of these ten papers. They cover a wide range of topics in biological dynamics which partially reflects the frontiers of research in the field. We believe that this collection will interest and benefit a wide range of readers in related areas.