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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Contents Vol 36(1)

Graeme Caughley and the fundamentals of population ecology: a personal view

Richard M. Sibly
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

School of Biological Sciences, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AS, UK and Centre for Integrated Population Ecology. Email: r.m.sibly@reading.ac.uk

Wildlife Research 36(1) 16-22 https://doi.org/10.1071/WR08024
Submitted: 8 February 2008  Accepted: 4 September 2008   Published: 21 January 2009

Abstract

Caughley’s contributions to single-species population ecology are here discussed in the light of some of the ideas and studies his work elicited, with particular reference to influences on my own work and that of my collaborators. Major themes are the manner and extent of population regulation; the alternate perspectives on population regulation that are obtained by density-dependence analyses and mechanistic analyses in terms of food availability and other causal factors; and ways in which mechanistic analyses can be elaborated to characterise a species’ ecological niche and relate it to the species’ geographic range.


Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Australasian Wildlife Management Society and the Australian Academy of Science for inviting me to the Fenner Conference in Canberra in December 2007 and for financial support, and to Jim Hone and three referees for comments on the manuscript.


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