Question

How does population ecology change with scale?

Answer 1

See below.

Explanation:

Population ecology refers to the study of how a population interacts with its environment. A population is defined as the individuals within a species that live and interact with one another regularly within a habitat.

Thus, how you define your habitat or the scale of your habitat is going to affect what your population looks like. For example, say you want to study the population ecology of red pandas. If you consider a large scale and your habitat is the Himalayan Mountains, your population is going to be much larger than if you choose a smaller scale and you define your habitat as only Mt Everest or even only the Himalayan Mountains in Bhutan.

There is no one way population ecology changes with scale. By changing the scale of your study area, you will see different patterns and processes. Population ecology is affected by numerous variables such as resource availability, habitat connectivity, predation and competition, patchiness of the habitat, edge effects, genetic diversity, disease, life history of the species, and so forth. Humans can have large impacts on population ecology through hunting, habitat destruction and degradation, and our overall impacts on the planet and ecosystem.

If you look at a population on a large scale, you may find that the habitat is very patchy, has a lot of edges, and you would expect your study population to do poorly because it needs more resources, space, and so forth. If your scale was one of these patches and the population within it, you might see different trends and patterns, especially if you were studying one of the larger patches where the population is doing well in terms of rescue availability and space.

Here's another example; if you're studying a small population of howler monkeys, you may observe that the genetic variation in the population is very low and you may predict that this population is not likely to survive in the long term. If you were to study a larger area with a larger population, you may see that genetic diversity is stable and well able to sustain the population in the long term.

To conclude, there is no one way scale affects population ecology but it is a very important concept and needs to be considered. Different patterns and processes are evident at different scales.