Population biology is a study of biological populations of organisms, especially in terms of biodiversity, evolution, and environmental biology. The term population biology is often used interchangeably with population ecology, although the term with biology is more frequently used when studying diseases, viruses, and microbes, and the term with ecology is used more frequently when studying plants and animals.
Population ecology (aka. autecology) is a major sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment. The more significant level of organization of a species is a population, because at this level the species gene pool is most coherent.
Synecology is the study of groups of organisms in relation to the environment, or community ecology. Synecology should be divided into population ecology, community ecology, and ecosystem ecology, defining autecology as essentially ';species ecology.'; ';Species ecology';鈥攕tudies emphasizing life history and behavior as adaptations to the environment of individual organisms or species is one of four sub-divisions of ecology.
The development of the field of population ecology owes much to the science of demography and the use of actuarial life tables. Population ecology has also played an important role in the development of the field of conservation biology especially in the development of population viability analysis (PVA) which makes it possible to predict the long-term probability of a species persisting in a given habitat patch (e.g., a national park).
While essentially a subfield of biology, population ecology provides many interesting problems for mathematicians and statisticians, which work mainly in the study of population dynamics.
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