The dynamics of natural populations: feedback structures in fluctuating environments La dinámica de las poblaciones naturales: estructuras de retroalimentación en ambientes fluctuantes
subject: Retroalimentación, clima, climate, dinámica poblacional, estocasticidad, estructura de la red trófica, exogenous factors, factores exógenos, feedback structure, food web structure, population dynamics, regulación estacional, seasonal regulation, stochasticity
description: The fluctuations exhibited by natural populations have fascinated ecologists for the last eighty years. However, a vigorous debate between different schools of population ecologists has hampered reaching a consensus about the causes of such numerical fluctuations. Recent findings and a more synthetic view of population change espoused by ecologists, statisticians, and mathematicians have integrated the role of nonlinear feedback (deterministic) and external environmental (deterministic or stochastic) processes in the dynamics of natural populations. The new challenge for population ecologists is to understand how these two different forces interact in nature. In this commentary, I review some of the basic principles of population analysis during the last 50 years. Finally, this commentary emphasize that one of the most promising approaches in population ecology will be the analysis and interpretation of time series data from several species in the same place, and the integration of demographic analysis and mathematical modeling. In both cases we need long-term data of biological populations and the factors that effect them. The potential insights gained from such an approach will help ecologists to understand better the dynamics of natural populations and will have large implications for applied issues such as conservation, management, and control of natural populationsLas fluctuaciones exhibidas por las poblaciones naturales han fascinado a los ecólogos durante los últimos ochenta años. Sin embargo, las acaloradas controversias entre las dos escuelas de ecólogos poblacionales han retrasado la explicación de dichas fluctuaciones numéricas. Recientes hallazgos y una visión más sintética del cambio poblacional lograda por los ecólogos, estadísticos y matemáticos han integrado el papel de los procesos no lineales (deterministas) y los procesos externos ambientales (deterministas o estocásticos) en la dinámica de las poblaciones naturales. El nuevo desafío para los ecól…
creator: MAURICIO LIMA
source: Revista Chilena de Historia Natural
publisher: BMC
date: 2001
relation: http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0716-078X2001000200009
coverage: Botany, Zoology