NOTE: candy is an integral part of today’s lecture . . . if that affects your decision to come in.

Today we begin talking about populations.  In the coming lectures, we’ll cover how populations change and grow, and how we can make predictions about populations.  For now, we’ll start with simply defining a population, and a little remedial counting.

1. • A population is a collection of individuals of the same species living in a defined area
   • Definition has practical importance for management and conservation – population is the critical unit on which interventions are applied and measured
     • Measuring the size of populations is a central problem in applied ecology
       • Number per area time area
       • Lincoln-Peterson Estimator – mark-recapture
     • Methodological notes on sampling:
       • random sampling helps to eliminate bias, but is inefficient
       • stratification helps to ensure that samples are representative

Below is a link to the Lincoln-Peterson Mark Recapture workbook that I used in class.

mark recapture workbook