Population ecology

Population ecology is a major sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment.

The older term, autecology (from Greek: αὐτο, auto, "self"; οίκος, oikos, "household"; and λόγος, logos, "knowledge") refers to the roughly same field of study, coming from the division of ecology into autecology&mdash;the study of individual species in relation to the environment&mdash;and synecology&mdash;the study of groups of organisms in relation to the environment&mdash;or community ecology. Odum (1959, p. 8) considered that synecology should be divided into population ecology, community ecology, and ecosystem ecology, defining autecology as essentially "species ecology." However, biologists have for some time recognized that the more significant level of organization of a species is a population, because at this level the species gene pool is most coherent. In fact, Odum regarded "autecology" as no longer a "present tendency" in ecology (i.e., an archaic term), although included "species ecology"&mdash;studies emphasizing life history and behavior as adaptations to the environment of individual organisms or species&mdash;as one of four sub-divisions of ecology.

The development of the field of population ecology owes much to the science of demography and the use of actuarial life tables. Population ecology has also played an important role in the development of the field of conservation biology especially in the development of population viability analysis (PVA) which makes it possible to predict the long-term probability of a species persisting in a given habitat patch (e.g., a national park).

While essentially a subfield of biology, population ecology provides many interesting problems for mathematicians and statisticians, which work mainly in the study of population dynamics.