1. What processes determine the size of a population in a particular habitat at a particular time?
2. What are the causes of variation in abundance in time and space?
3. What processes determine the range and extent of these numerical changes?
1. Understanding principles.
2. Applying principles to real populations of fish and wildlife.
1 Early history of the population and its protection.
2. Response to protection and recent decline.
3. Potential causes of population changes.
4. Key factor analysis.
5. Factors related to birth rates and death rates.
6. Population projections.
7. Evaluating the effects of removals.
In a recent guest editorial in the Society For Conservation Biology Newsletter Gordon Orians suggested that the approach we are taking to the study of population ecology, melding basic and applied ecology, is crucial to addressing the 2 pressing environmental problems facing humanity ("impending global climate change and likely extinction of a significant fraction of the world's species during the next century"). Orians highlights this interplay of basic and applied ecology in some of the historical developments in population ecology from Ulpian's use of life tables in the third century to enable Romans to determine the amount of funds needed to cover insurance needs of religious societies, to Pearl's demographic studies of Drosophila funded by insurance companies, to physicist Vito Volterra's development of fundamental equations of population dynamics to assist his son-in-law, a fisheries biologist, with pressing Italian fisheries problems.
Orians highlights current applications of population ecology in dynamics of small populations emphasizing powerful influences of genetic drift on both promoting adaptations and evolution and reducing genetic variability, fecundity, and competitive abilities. He develops the geographical aspects emphasizing range limits, shifts from global warming, and difficulties of movement across landscapes puncutated by many barriers. Finally he identifies the crucial importance of fragmentation and the development of restoration ecology as an applied science founded on fundamental ecological principles. He argues that this interplay of basic and applied ecology is critical to meeting our ethical responsibilities as steward's of Earth's biological richness. (See Orians, Gordon H. 1997. Basic and applied ecology: a false dichotomy. Society for Conservation Biology Newsletter 4(1):1-2.)
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Updated 19 August 2002