Publication Date:
2005-07-26
Description:
A key unresolved question in population ecology concerns the relationship between a population's size and its growth rate. We estimated this relationship for 1780 time series of mammals, birds, fish, and insects. We found that rates of population growth are high at low population densities but, contrary to previous predictions, decline rapidly with increasing population size and then flatten out, for all four taxa. This produces a strongly concave relationship between a population's growth rate and its size. These findings have fundamental implications for our understanding of animals' lives, suggesting in particular that many animals in these taxa will be found living at densities above the carrying capacity of their environments.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Sibly, Richard M -- Barker, Daniel -- Denham, Michael C -- Hone, Jim -- Pagel, Mark -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2005 Jul 22;309(5734):607-10.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉School of Animal and Microbial Sciences, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AJ, UK. r.m.sibly@reading.ac.uk〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16040705" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Animals, Wild
;
*Birds
;
Conservation of Natural Resources
;
Databases, Factual
;
*Ecosystem
;
Environment
;
*Fishes
;
*Insects
;
Logistic Models
;
*Mammals
;
Mathematics
;
Models, Biological
;
Phylogeny
;
Population Density
;
Population Dynamics
;
Population Growth
;
Regression Analysis
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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