What is population growth?

Population growth is the increase in the number of individuals in a population.

Global human population growth amounts to around 75 million annually, or 1.1%
per year. The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7 billion in
2012.

What are the factors limiting population growth?

 Lack of resources

 Lack of places to live

 Lack of places to reproduce

 Increased risk of disease

 Increased risk of predation

 Natural disasters

Limitations to population growth that are influenced by the size of a population in

a given area, called population density, are called density-dependent factors
(DDF).

DDFs include

 Resource supply

 Habitat supply

 Disease

 Predation

 Other factors that have an increasing impact on birth and death rates as the
population increases in size

When the population is small, there is more than enough food for each person, so
resource supply does not affect birth or death rates. As the population grows let’s
say for example Africa, the amount of food available to each person diminishes,
resource supply can begin to affect birth and death rates. The less food per person,
or, the more person per food, the greater the impact of resource supply on the birth
and death rates (hence, the growth rate) and of the human population.

Now let’s talk about penguins. Emperor penguins can live in few places on Earth.
The size of penguin populations is not only limited by resource supply (how many
fishes per penguin) , but also by the amount of space they have, the number of sea
lions, or predators, that feed on them, and other factors.

When taken together, all of the density-dependent factors that influence a

population’s growth contribute to an environment’s carrying capacity for the
population, or the maximum size a population can reach in that environment.

We should point out (so we will) that population growth is also limited by factors
that couldn’t care less about population density. These aptly named density-
independent factors (DIF) affect population birth and death rates randomly, and
include such things as

 Floods

 Fires

 Earthquakes

 Meteors

 Volcanoes

 Nuclear bombs