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2: Population Ecology

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  • Page ID
    12224

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    • 2.1: Introduction
      Ecology is a sub-discipline of biology that studies the interactions between organisms and their environments.
    • 2.2: Population Growth Models
      Populations change over time and space as individuals are born or immigrate (arrive from outside the population) into an area and others die or emigrate (depart from the population to another location). Populations grow and shrink and the age and gender composition also change through time and in response to changing environmental conditions.
    • 2.3: Factors Limiting Population Growth
      Eventually, one or more environmental factors will limit its population growth rate as the population size approaches the carrying capacity and density increases.
    • 2.4: Life Tables and Survivorship
      Biologists use a life table as a quick window into the lives of the individuals of a population, showing how long they are likely to live, when they’ll reproduce, and how many offspring they’ll produce. Life tables are used to construct survivorship curves, which are graphs showing the proportion of individuals of a particular age that are now alive in a population.
    • 2.5: Population Ecology Practice Problems

    Thumbnail: A herd of goats grazing in a field. (Unsplash License; shraga kopstein via Unsplash)

    This page titled 2: Population Ecology is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Caralyn Zehnder, Kalina Manoylov, Samuel Mutiti, Christine Mutiti, Allison VandeVoort, & Donna Bennett (GALILEO Open Learning Materials) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.