Population Dynamics
A population describes a group of individuals of the same species occupying a specific area at a specific time. Some characteristics of populations that are of interest to biologists include the population density, the birthrate, and the death rate. If there is immigration into the population, or emigration out of it, then the immigration rate and emigration rate are also of interest. Together, these population parameters, or characteristics, describe how the population density changes over time. The ways in which population densities fluctuate—increasing, decreasing, or both over time—is the subject of population dynamics.
Population density measures the number of individuals per unit area, for example, the number of deer per square kilometer. Although this is straightforward in theory, determining population densities for many species can be challenging in practice.
Measuring Population Density
One way to measure population density is simply to count all the individuals. This, however, can be laborious. Alternatively, good estimates of population density can often be obtained via the quadrat method. In the quadrat method, all the individuals of a given species are counted in some subplot of the total area. Then that data is used to figure out what the total number of individuals across the entire habitat should be.
This page contains 201 words.
Population Dynamics article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 2,132 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Population dynamics Article
