GEO 702 Chapter Notes -Exponential Growth, Improved Sanitation, Carrying Capacity
16 Oct 2014
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Document Summary
7 billion people grows every year by 83 million. 2 reasons to care about the growth of population: each of us depend on the earth"s life-support system for food, shelter, clean water, air, etc. Adding more people on earth increases the need for the natural resources: contributes to degrading of our life-support system with the growing ecological footprints. Exponential growth - the growth of any quantity at a fixed percentage per unit of time. Growth starts out slow, but eventually population growth increases rapidly. Limiting factors to exponential growth - availability of resources and environmental threats. Carrying capacity - maximum population of a given species that an area of land or a volume of water can sustain indefinitely. As size of population nears carrying capacity, rate of growth slows due to decreasing resources there are always limits to population growth in nature as there is not enough resources to sustain an ever-growing population of any species.
