Title: Goals & Learning Objectives - chp 55
Course: BIO-182 RTZ > Section: week 11 - Population Ecology

GOALS and LEARNING OBJECTIVES (Chapter 55:  Population Ecology)

GOALS:

- Understand how ecologists study populations and population dynamics
- Describe factors that limit and influence populations, including habitat variation

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

1. Define “population” and explain its ecological significance.
2. Define “population density” and explain the importance of this measure.
3. Outline a method of population sampling and describe how that method helps us to understand a population.
4. Explain why population parameters such as density, birth rates, and death rates are important to understanding population dynamics within an ecosystem.
5. Describe three dispersion patterns and factors that contribute to the occurrence of each.
6. Describe the kinds of information about populations that can be derived from age distributions and how such information can be used to predict future population dynamics.
7. Explain how demographic events influence population structures and their distributions.
8. Contrast the life histories of species that fall into the three different survivorship classes.
9. Provide an example of exponential growth and describe the consequences.
10. Summarize the factors that determine the carrying capacity of an environment for a particular species.
11. Provide a quantitative explanation of the logistic growth pattern.
12. Compare and contrast density-dependent and density-independent factors.
13. Explain how resource abundance, body size, and social organization affect the population distribution of a species.
14. Compare and contrast K-strategists and r-strategists.
15. Describe the effect of habitat patches and corridors on subpopulations of a species.
16. Provide examples of successful and unsuccessful efforts at biological control of a species. Describe the current structure of the human population and how, based on ecological principles, it might progress.

KEY TERMS:

age structure, biological control, biotic potential, carrying capacity (K), clumped dispersion pattern, cohort, corridor, demographic event, demography, density-dependent, density-independent, dispersion, dispersion pattern, ecological survivorship curve, environmental resistance, exponential growth, habitat patch, intrinsic rate of increase, iteroparous, K-strategist, life history strategy, logistic growth, mark–recapture method, metapopulation, mortality, per capita growth rate (r), population, r-strategist, random dispersion pattern, regular (uniform) dispersion pattern, semelparous, subpopulation, survivorship, survivorship curve, transect.