Population forecasters have a long tradition of explicitly stating the uncertainty of their forecasts by means of specifying alternative variants. In addition to a medium variant, usually high and low variants are published. One problem in using high and low variants is that it is unknown how likely it is that the interval between these variants will cover the actual population size. Probabilis...

This article concerns the aftermath of the International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in 1994. The discussion focuses on the visible paradigm shift accomplished at the Cairo conference. Previously, the concern was on population size relative to resources, and about the impact of population growth on the tempo and type of economic development. In the post Cairo era, ...

Global warming impacts virtually all biota and ecosystems. Many of these impacts are mediated through direct effects of temperature on individual vital rates. Yet how this translates from the individual to the population level is still poorly understood, hampering the assessment of global warming impacts on population structure and dynamics. Here, we study the effects of temperature on intraspe...

A strong demographic Allee effect in which the expected population growth rate is negative below a certain critical population size can cause high extinction probabilities in small introduced populations. But many species are repeatedly introduced to the same location and eventually one population may overcome the Allee effect by chance. With the help of stochastic models, we investigate how mu...

Whether and how habitat fragmentation and population size jointly affect adaptive genetic variation and adaptive population differentiation are largely unexplored. Owing to pronounced genetic drift, small, fragmented populations are thought to exhibit reduced adaptive genetic variation relative to large populations. Yet fragmentation is known to increase variability within and among habitats as...

Demographic rates, such as annual survival rate, are generally difficult to estimate for long-lived seabirds, because of the length of time required for this kind of study and the remoteness of colonies. However, a small colony of northern royal albatross (Diomedea sanfordi) established itself on the mainland of New Zealand at Taiaroa Head, making possible regular banding and monitoring of its ...

Bauwens, D.: Life-history variation in lacertid lizards. Nat. Croat., Vol. 8, No. 3., 239–252, 1999, Zagreb. The life history of an organism is the combination of age-specific survival probabilities and fecundities it displays in its natural environment. Hence, an organism's life history is characterised by its age and size at maturity, frequency of reproduction, clutch or litter size, size of ...

We compared the population growth patterns of 5 species of the rotifer genus Lecane [(L. quadridentata (Ehrenberg, 1830), L. comuta (Muller, 1786), L. papuana (Murray, 1913), L. unguitata (Fadeev, 1925) and L. pyriformis (Daday, 1905)] ranging in adult average body size from 30 to 140 microm. All species were cultured under laboratory conditions for 25-30 days using the green alga Scenedesmus a...

Environmental change continually perturbs populations from a stable state, leading to transient dynamics that can last multiple generations. Several long-term studies have reported changes in trait distributions along with demographic response to environmental change. Here we conducted an experimental study on soil mites and investigated the interaction between demography and an individual trai...

Flowers, as repeated modules on a plant, may show population dynamics that correspond to ecological models for population growth. We hypothesized that rate of flower production (birth rate), number of open flowers per day (population size) and flower duration (longevity) should be related to plant resource status. With dioecious species, resource demands of male or female function would contrib...