Problem:
Find an example of the concept your peer 'taught' as it applies to a non-ungulate species. Describe the example and expand on the explanation of the concept. Need Assignment Help?
Respond to the concept your peer had questions about and try to teach them what you have learned and provide an explanation that might clarify the concept.
Provide a source in JWM format
Hey everyone, my name is Caroline, and for this discussion, Lectures on Population, I decided to discuss top-down and bottom-up population forcing first. So these terms are used interchangeably by ecologists. Variations include top-down or bottom-up regulation, process, forcing, and population control. And Boyer defined top-down regulation as a population controlled by predation, while bottom-up regulation is a population controlled by the availability of resource or prey in their environment. And the common example I chose to visualize top -down population control is the historic reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, which aided in decreasing the overgrown elk population that had previously been a bottom -up process and it decimated the native vegetation in turn until the wolves were restored. I researched two outside peer review articles offering further information into these concepts. This first article by Anker discusses how protected white eagles create top-down effects that can in turn harm seabird populations, and the second article by Rocha explores how the natural bottomup process of desert-dwelling species is no longer viable for wildlife populations and is in turn leading to potential extinction rates due to human activity and climate change. Now the second concept I chose to express my confusion with is density dependence. So what is density dependence? According to Boyer, density dependence is an essential component for understanding the population ecology of large animals and the dictionary definition is that in ecology any force that affects the size of a population of living things in response to the density of the population also known as the number of individuals per unit area now this seems pretty straightforward until my mind starts to wonder about outside sources directly impacting wildlife populations and mimicking density dependence. So, what if a population steadily increases, the species is overhunted, and the birth rate decreases at the same time? Now, the questions I decided to ask are as follows. What factors can be masked over by density dependence? What role does human activity have in density-dependent populations? Can a population be both density dependent and independent? And can we accurately determine if a species is density dependent considering habitat loss and climate change impacts in our surrounding ecosystems today? And here are the resources I used for this assignment.