Practical 3

Demographic and environmental stochasticity

The previous practical introduced us to how populations grow under different combinations of birth and death rates and environmental resource availability. But these three parameters (and all other population growth parameters) are seldom, if ever, fixed at set values. If we study actual populations in the wild, however, we will quickly observe that their population sizes won’t quite follow these rigid patterns but rather fluctuate randomly (or stochastically) for a variety of reasons. In this practical we will explore how we can model two kinds of this stochasticity - demographic stochasticity and evironmental stochasticity.

Mark breakdown

Worksheet questions - 29
Coding questions - 33
Application questions - 53
Total - 115