Unit 3 -populations vocab list ALi portis

Generalist

able to thrive in a wide variety of environmental conditions and can make use of a variety of different resources

Specialist

can thrive only in a narrow range of environmental conditions or has a limited diet.

K-selected species

produce offspring that each have a higher probability of survival to maturity

R-selected species

Such a species puts only a small investment of resources into each offspring, but produces many such low effort babies

Survivorship curves

a graph that measures the proportion of individuals in a given species that are alive at different ages.

Type I

populations whose organisms tend to survive beyond their young and middle-ages and die when they become elderly.

Type II

represent populations with a constant proportion of individuals dying at each age interval

Type III

represent populations that have a high death rate among the young, but a relatively low death rate for those who survive into middle and old age.

Carrying capacity (K)

the number of individuals of a population that can be sustained indefinitely by a given area.

Crude birth rate (CBR)

is the number of births per 1,000 people in a population.

Crude Death rate (CDR)

is the number of deaths per 1,000 people in a population.

Growth rate (r)

The rate, or speed, at which the number of organisms in a population increases.

rule of 70

used to determine the number of years it takes for a variable to double by dividing the number 70 by the variable's growth rate.

Doubling time

the time it takes for a population to double in size/value.

Life expectancy

a statistical measure of the estimate of the average remaining years of life at a given age

Immigration

simply to movement of an organism to an area.

Emigration

when a population or organism leaves their native land to pursue a new life in a non-native land

Age structure

a graph that shows the distribution of ages across a population divided down the center between male and female members of the population.

Total Fertility Rate (TFR)

as the total number of children that would be born to each woman if she were to live to the end of her child-bearing years and give birth to children in alignment with the prevailing age-specific fertility rates.

Replacement level Fertility (RLF)

the level of fertility at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the next

Infant mortality rate (IMR)

the probability of a child born in a specific year or period dying before reaching the age of one, if subject to age-specific mortality rates of that period.

Child mortality rate (CMR)

The probability of dying between exact age 1 and exact age 5, expressed per 1,000 children at age 1

Fecundity

the individual's reproductive potential.

Density dependent factors

any force that affects the size of a population of living things in response to the density of the population

Density independent factors

limiting factors that affect the population of organisms but not restricting them to be at or within a certain number, range, or density.

Epidemiology

the study of the determinants, occurrence, and distribution of health and disease in a defined population.

demographic transition model (dtm)

based on historical population trends of two demographic characteristics - birth rate and death rate - to suggest that a country's total population growth rate cycles through stages as that country develops economically.

Biotic potential

the maximum reproductive capacity of an organism under optimum environmental conditions.

malthusian theory

the supply of food cannot keep up with the growth of the human population, inevitably resulting in disease, famine, war, and calamity

Cornucopians

the idea that continued supply of the material needs of humankind can be achieved through continued advances in technology

Cassandra

a person who prophesies doom or disaster

IPAT model

Environmental impact (I) is the product of three factors: population (P), affluence (A) and technology (T).

Rachel Carson

well known for her writings on environmental pollution and the natural history of the sea.

Julia Butterfly Hill

lived in a tree for 738 days in an act of civil disobedience to prevent clear-cutting of ecologically significant forests.

Silent springs book

how indiscriminate application of agricultural chemicals, pesticides, and other modern chemicals polluted our streams, damaged bird and animal populations, and caused severe medical problems for humans.

DDT

(dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was developed as the first of the modern synthetic insecticides in the 1940s.

Mass extinctions

when species vanish much faster than they are replaced

Green revolution

a period of technology transfer initiatives that saw greatly increased crop yields

Intraspecific competition

an interaction in population ecology, whereby members of the same species compete for limited resources.

Interspecific competition

the competition between species for shared resources such as space, food and nesting sites during the breeding season and also for roosting sites during the non-breeding season