Overpopulation or overabundance is a phenomenon in which a species' population becomes larger than the carrying capacity of its environment. This may be caused by increased birth rates, lowered mortality rates, reduced predation or large scale migration, leading to an overabundant species and other animals in the ecosystem competing for food, space, and resources. The animals in an overpopulated area may then be forced to migrate to areas not typically inhabited, or die off without access to necessary resources.
Judgements regarding overpopulation always involve both facts and values. Animals often are judged overpopulated when their numbers cause impacts that people find dangerous, damaging, expensive, or otherwise harmful. Societies may be judged overpopulated when their human numbers cause impacts that degrade ecosystem services, decrease human health and well-being, or crowd other species out of existence.
In ecology, overpopulation is a concept used primarily in wildlife management. Typically, an overpopulation causes the entire population of the species in question to become weaker, as no single individual is able to find enough food or shelter. As such, overpopulation is thus characterized by an increase in the diseases and parasite-load which live upon the species in question, as the entire population is weaker. Other characteristics of overpopulation are lower fecundity, adverse effects on the environment (soil, vegetation or fauna) and lower average body weights. Especially the worldwide increase of deer populations, which usually show irruptive growth, is proving to be of ecological concern. Ironically, where ecologists were preoccupied with conserving or augmenting deer populations only a century ago, the focus has now shifted in the direct opposite, and ecologists are now more concerned with limiting the populations of such animals.
Supplemental feeding of charismatic species or interesting game species is a major problem in causing overpopulation, as is too little hunting or trapping of such species.
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Overexploitation, also called overharvesting, refers to harvesting a renewable resource to the point of diminishing returns. Continued overexploitation can lead to the destruction of the resource, as it will be unable to replenish. The term applies to natural resources such as water aquifers, grazing pastures and forests, wild medicinal plants, fish stocks and other wildlife. In ecology, overexploitation describes one of the five main activities threatening global biodiversity.
Wildlife management is the management process influencing interactions among and between wildlife, its habitats and people to achieve predefined impacts. It attempts to balance the needs of wildlife with the needs of people using the best available science. Wildlife management can include wildlife conservation, gamekeeping and pest control. Wildlife management draws on disciplines such as mathematics, chemistry, biology, ecology, climatology and geography to gain the best results.
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.
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