Population Ecology Quiz

Population Ecology: A Study of Species Populations and Their Interaction with the Environment

• Population ecology focuses on the dynamics of species populations and their interaction with the environment.
• It covers birth and death rates, immigration and emigration, and population viability analysis.
• Population ecology is important in conservation biology, and it provides interesting problems for mathematicians and statisticians who work in population dynamics.
• The discipline began in the 1940s and was divided into autecology and synecology.
• A population is defined as a group of interacting organisms of the same species, and its demographic structure is how populations are often quantified.
• Population size is defined as the total number of individuals in a population, and population density is how dense these individuals are.
• The maximum per capita growth rate for a population is known as the intrinsic rate of increase, and carrying capacity is the maximum population size of the species that the environment can sustain.
• Population dynamics is the development of population ecology, and it owes much to the mathematical models known as population dynamics.
• There are two types of growth models: exponential and logistic.
• The r/K selection theory is an important concept in population ecology, which distinguishes between r and K selected species.
• Top-down and bottom-up controls are driven by producers in the ecosystem, and some populations are controlled by organisms at the top.
• Survivorship curves show the distribution of populations according to age, and the metapopulation concept was introduced in 1969.
• Scientific articles on population ecology can be found in the Journal of Animal Ecology, Oikos, and other journals.