Danielle Boehler 1st Hour

Land of How Many? Like individual organisms, populations have unique characteristics such as growth rate, age structure, sex ratio, and mortality rate. Populations can be defined as groups of individuals who belong to the same species and reside in the same region within the same period of time. Due to the prior mentioned characteristics, populations have the ability to fluctuate. When plentiful resources are available, the increase in populations skyrockets. Other things such as climate, food, habitat, and water availability also have an impact on the population growth rate. Biotic potential, being the highest ability a population has to increase under certain conditions, is represented by a letter r when it is used in mathematic equations. The study of populations is given the title, Population Biology. This term is used when studying microbes, diseases, viruses, and also the regulation of population size and life history traits. One well known population biologist, Paul Enrich, joined forces with his wife Anne and wrote a book promoting scenarios which detailed possible future events involving population. They believed that we needed to have population control and proposed many different solutions to fix the future issues of population. Paul believed that the government should control the amount of children allowed per household to two or fewer children to stop the world from overpopulating. Though, there were many mistakes made in his research, and critics tore him down for that. Relating to population is the carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the amount of people who can be supported in any given area within their natural resource limits, without degrading the aspects of the environment. Technology is able to alter the carrying capacity but mostly it is affected by population increase. Carrying capacity shrinks as the environment degrades, leaving

Danielle Boehler 1st Hour

the environment unsupportive of the number of people who have lived in the area on a regular basis. In the research I conducted, I came up with three different equations to represent the growth of world populations since the year AD 0. The first equation conducted was a linear equation. The equation I came up with was y = 3.9834x 3950.1, my r value being 0.601415. After coming up with this equation, it was then time to predict the world population in the year 2030 by plugging that year into our newly formed equation. The number I was given after plugging that year into my calculator was 4,136 million. After that, it was time to move to the next equation. The next equation I was to use was an exponential equation. From my graph, I received the model of y = e^0.0022x. The r value given to me was .0786257. Following that was the prediction for world population in the year of 2030. By substituting this year for x in my equation, I came up with a population of 3,563 million people. Finally, I moved on to the last equation required to help determine the most accurate way of predicting world populations the logarithmic equation. After graphing the years and populations, I received the model of y = 3.914ln(x) 26007 and the r value was .507346. Then I plugged in 2030 for x in order to find the predicted population for that year. My prediction was 3,807 million people. After conducting my research on these three equations, I came to the conclusion that the exponential graph represents world population the best. I say this because the exponential graph looks the most similar to my scatter plot. Also I believe that population will increase slightly throughout the years, and the exponential graph supports that theory.

Danielle Boehler 1st Hour

Works Cited http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/history/world-population-growth.htm Anonymous. March 24th, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Historical_figures Anonymous. March 24th, 2014 http://www.npg.org/facts/world_pop_year.htm Anonymous. March 25th, 2014 http://animals.about.com/cs/zoology/a/zoo101ae.htm Anonymous. March 25th, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_biology Anonymous. March 25h, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich Anonymous. March 25th, 2014