| The fluctuations exhibited by natural populations have fascinated ecologists for the last eighty years. However, a vigorous debate between different schools of population ecologists has hampered reaching a consensus about the causes of such numerical fluctuations. Recent findings and a more synthetic view of population change espoused by ecologists, statisticians, and mathematicians have integrated the role of nonlinear feedback (deterministic) and external environmental (deterministic or stochastic) processes in the dynamics of natural populations. The new challenge for population ecologists is to understand how these two different forces interact in nature. In this commentary, I review some of the basic principles of population analysis during the last... |
