This material is designed to introduce you to several important issues in ecology that are directly important to conservation, and indirectly important to several ecosystem issues. Density-independent population growth.
Population ecology is a subdiscipline of ecology dealing with the growth and decline of populations.
It is closely related to community ecology, conservation, and population genetics. Aside from the issue of human population size, understanding population growth is important in conserving species, in controlling and predicting outbreaks of pests and diseases, in understanding evolution, and in gauging the effects of various environmental factors on wild species. You can probably think of some additional reasons to understand population growth. Models play an important role in population ecology. Usually these models are mathematical.