The Importance Of Population Ecology

An ecosystem is a community of living organisms (plants, animals etc.) in a particular area. Ecology is the study of living things, and their relationship with the environment surrounding them. There are many different sub-branches in ecology, one of them being population ecology. Population ecology deals with species population and how these populations interact with the environment. It is the study of how the population size of species change over time and space. As shown in the simple ecosystem with the rabbits, wolves and grass. The grass is the producer, the rabbits are first order consumers, and the wolves are the second order consumers in this particular ecosystem. A food chain is a series of organisms which then each depend on the next source of food. The activity with the

The differences between the two are mainly because graph 2, was manipulated so the rabbit’s had a population 200 compared to 20 in figure 1. There are still similarities however in this simple food chain. Shown in both of these graphs is when the trend line of the rabbit’s population is at its highest point the capacity of the grass will always decrease. This is because the rabbit’s source of food contains grass. Rabbits feed off grass which then decreases the amount left. Another similarity in these ecosystems include when the capacity of the wolves increase, the population of the rabbits decrease as a result. This is due to wolves feeding off the rabbit’s which then leaves a lower number left in the ecosystem: grass  rabbits  wolves. Overall every ecosystem containing a predatory, prey and producer will present similarities and differences throughout a certain time period. As seen in these two different population statistics changing the rabbit’s population from 20 to 200, affected the overall result, however figure 1 and 2 still have many of the same similarities many other simple ecosystems