Stochastic population theory faces reality in the laboratory

Bernt-Erik Saether; Steinar Engen

doi:10.1016/j.tree.2004.05.003

Stochastic population theory faces reality in the laboratory

Trends Ecol Evol. 2004 Jul;19(7):351-3. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2004.05.003.

Authors

Bernt-Erik Saether¹, Steinar Engen

Affiliation

¹ Department of Biology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway. Bernt-Erik.Sather@bio.ntnu.no

PMID: 16701284
DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2004.05.003

Abstract

Understanding the factors that affect most severely the extinction risk of populations is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. An important general pattern derived from stochastic population theory is that time to extinction should decrease with increasing environmental stochasticity. Drake and Lodge recently provided one of the first pieces of experimental support for this simple prediction by artificially manipulating the dynamics of populations of Daphnia. A future challenge will be to include both demographic stochasticity and environmental stochasticity in such studies.