Karl Banse, George Boehlert, Robert Haney, George Hunt, Patricia Livingston, William Pearcy, Daniel Ware. Working Definition Carrying capacity is a measure of the biomass of a given population that can be supported by the ecosystem.
Resources are a function of the productivity of the prey populations and competition.
Changes in the physical and biotic environment affect the distributions and productivity of all populations involved. The group agreed that carrying capacity exists, however they did not believe that it was worthwhile to attempt to measure it as an absolute value. Further, it was not instructive to attempt to provide a rigorous definition that would facilitate its direct measurement. Rather, they assumed that when a species approaches carrying capacity, density dependence will start to affect the important population parameters. To this end, it was informative to describe the various levels of scale that were relevant to physical forcing and ecosystem interactions.