BIOL3007 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Minimum Viable Population, Inbreeding Depression, Metapopulation

• School: University of Sydney
• Department: Biology
• Course: BIOL3007
• Professor: Professor Dieter Hochulli

Document Summary

Assumption: everything is the same from place to place. Metapopulation (contains patched): a set of small populations occupying an array of habitat patches. If local populations are small, they will be threatened by extinction pressures. We need to focus on the probability of extinction. Interpatch interactions such as migration may be affected by the habitat background. Minimum viable population size (mvp): a population size that will ensure some acceptable level of risk that allows the population to exist for some time. Demographic stochasticity: the smaller the population, the more likely the effect of an individual comes out to be at the population level. Genetic stochasticity: inbreeding depression, loss of genetic variation and accumulation of deleterious mutations. Environmental stochasticity: the variations in temperature and resources (can happen with all population sizes). Natural catastrophes: can reset systems down to very low levels and species of interest may have a dependence on other species making the dependent species of higher risk.