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Concept
Population ecology
Summary
Population ecology is a sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment, such as birth and death rates, and by immigration and emigration.
The discipline is important in conservation biology, especially in the development of population viability analysis which makes it possible to predict the long-term probability of a species persisting in a given patch of habitat. Although population ecology is a subfield of biology, it provides interesting problems for mathematicians and statisticians who work in population dynamics.
In the 1940s ecology was divided into autecology—the study of individual species in relation to the environment—and synecology—the study of groups of species in relation to the environment. The term autecology (from Ancient Greek: αὐτο, aúto, "self"; οίκος, oíkos, "household"; and λόγος, lógos, "knowledge"), refers to roughly the same field of study as concepts such as life cycles and behaviour as adaptations to the environment by individual organisms. Eugene Odum, writing in 1953, considered that synecology should be divided into population ecology, community ecology and ecosystem ecology, renaming autecology as 'species ecology' (Odum regarded "autecology" as an archaic term), thus that there were four subdivisions of ecology.
A population is defined as a group of interacting organisms of the same species. A demographic structure of a population is how populations are often quantified. The total number of individuals in a population is defined as a population size, and how dense these individuals are is defined as population density. There is also a population’s geographic range, which has limits that a species can tolerate (such as temperature).
Population size can be influenced by the per capita population growth rate (rate at which the population size changes per individual in the population.) Births, deaths, emigration, and immigration rates all play a significant role in growth rate.
Official source
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