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The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment 's maximal load, [clarification needed] which in population ecology corresponds to ...
Population growth is the increase in the number of people in a population or dispersed group. Actual global human population growth amounts to around 83 million annually, or 1.1% per year. [2] The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.9 billion in 2020. [3] The UN projected population to keep growing, and estimates have put ...
Population dynamics has traditionally been the dominant branch of mathematical biology, which has a history of more than 220 years, [1] although over the last century the scope of mathematical biology has greatly expanded. [citation needed] The beginning of population dynamics is widely regarded as the work of Malthus, formulated as the ...
Logistic function. A logistic function or logistic curve is a common S-shaped curve ( sigmoid curve) with the equation. where. is the carrying capacity, the supremum of the values of the function; is the logistic growth rate, the steepness of the curve; and. is the value of the function's midpoint. [1]
Here x is the size of the population at a given time, r is inherent per-capita growth rate, and K is the carrying capacity.. Two species. Given two populations, x 1 and x 2, with logistic dynamics, the Lotka–Volterra formulation adds an additional term to account for the species' interactions.
The belief that global population levels will become too large to sustain is a point of contentious debate. Those who believe global human overpopulation to be a valid concern, argue that increased levels of resource consumption and pollution exceed the environment's carrying capacity, leading to population overshoot.
As resources become more limited, the growth rate tapers off, and eventually, once growth rates are at the carrying capacity of the environment, the population size will taper off. This S-shaped curve observed in logistic growth is a more accurate model than exponential growth for observing real-life population growth of organisms.
By contrast, K-selected species display traits associated with living at densities close to carrying capacity and typically are strong competitors in such crowded niches, that invest more heavily in fewer offspring, each of which has a relatively high probability of surviving to adulthood (i.e., low r, high K).