THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING STOICHIOMETRIC: POPULATION DYNAMICS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF CHEMICAL ELEMENTS by Irakli Loladze

Every organism is composed of multiple chemical elements such as carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus. The relative proportions of such elements vary within and among species. How such facts affect organismal, population and ecosystem dynamics is the focus of ecological stoichiometry, which to date has been largely ignored by population dynamics theory. In this dissertation, stoichiometric principles, true for all populations, were formulated and used to derive constraints, in the form of minimum functions, on total biomass and growth rates. These constraints, which interrelate population properties with organismal and ecosystem properties, were incorporated into well-known population dynamics models to analyze two primary types of interactions: consumer-resource and