This paper examines the relationships among population dynamics, environment and economic development. We focus particularly on urbanization, whose impact is often characterized as strongly negative. We first examine the broad conceptual issues of population, urbanization, and environment, providing demographic insight to the understanding of the This Chapter is from the volume: de Sherbiniin, ...

Models are formulated for the population dynamics of a monoecious or dioecious species with an all-female parthenogenetic sibling species which is also gynogenetic. Continuous, deterministic reproduction and mortality, a stationary age distribution, random mating, and limited sexual competence for all individuals are posited. It is also supposed that in the dioecious case males do not distingui...

We propose an extension of the study of imitation in artefacts in which imitation takes place at the populationlevel. Instead of assuming a one-to-one teacher-student relation between agents, agents in our set-up take on no particular role and have to build up a repertoire of actions through imitative interaction with all other agents in the population. This allows us to study the sufficient an...

We study a general predator–prey system in a spatially heterogeneous environment. The predation process, which occurs on a behavioural time-scale, is much faster than the other processes (reproduction, natural mortality and migrations) occurring on the population dynamics time-scale. We show that, taking account of this difference in time-scales, and assuming that the prey have a refuge, the dy...

In this work, we analyzed the impact of interventions on populations which exhibit unimodal dynamics. The six landmarks that characterize the “shape” of the unimodal reproduction curve   f x of the difference equation,   1 n n X f X   , are defined and used in order to examine and determine the behavior of dynamics of populations. By using the Li-Yorke criterion for determination of chaos...

Dispersal is a context-dependent adaptive trait. Different dispersal strategies arise as species need to optimize their fitness in the ever changing quality of habitats further imposed by abiotic and biotic factors. This work reviews the spread of populations under different dispersal strategies. Namely, we address the spread of a population when dispersal is driven by habitat fragmentations, d...

Computer simulations show that the extinction of megafauna is not correlated with the growth of human population. The population of megafauna remains constant during the nearly entire time of the rapid growth of human population. Model-generated growth of human population is also in direct conflict with the empirical evidence about the human population dynamics. Computer simulations do not supp...