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The development of population ecology owes much to the mathematical models known as population dynamics, which were originally formulae derived from demography at the end of the 18th and beginning of 19th century. The beginning of population dynamics is widely regarded as the work of Malthus, formulated as the Malthusian growth model.
Population. Population is the term typically used to refer to the number of people in a single area. Governments conduct a census to quantify the size of a resident population within a given jurisdiction. The term is also applied to non-human animals, microorganisms, and plants, and has specific uses within such fields as ecology and genetics .
Ecology (from Ancient Greek οἶκος (oîkos) 'house', and -λογία ( -logía) 'study of') [A] is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level.
In ecology, r/K selection theory relates to the selection of combinations of traits in an organism that trade off between quantity and quality of offspring. The focus on either an increased quantity of offspring at the expense of individual parental investment of r -strategists, or on a reduced quantity of offspring with a corresponding ...
Ecosystem ecology is an inherently interdisciplinary field of study. An individual ecosystem is composed of populations of organisms, interacting within communities, and contributing to the cycling of nutrients and the flow of energy. The ecosystem is the principal unit of study in ecosystem ecology. Population, community, and physiological ...
Community ecology or synecology is the study of the interactions between species in communities on many spatial and temporal scales, including the distribution, structure, abundance, demography, and interactions between coexisting populations. [1] The primary focus of community ecology is on the interactions between populations as determined by ...
Source–sink dynamics is a theoretical model used by ecologists to describe how variation in habitat quality may affect the population growth or decline of organisms . Since quality is likely to vary among patches of habitat, it is important to consider how a low quality patch might affect a population. In this model, organisms occupy two ...
An ecotype is a variant in which the phenotypic differences are too few or too subtle to warrant being classified as a subspecies. These different variants can occur in the same geographic region where distinct habitats such as meadow, forest, swamp, and sand dunes provide ecological niches. Where similar ecological conditions occur in widely ...