ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book summarizes a number of legal, regulatory, business, and other decision contexts relative to protecting populations. It discusses issues in population ecology that are germane to improving the quality of population-level risk assessments. The book introduces the concept of density dependence in population regulation, reviewing the state of science with respect to theory and its practical application. It focuses on the genetics of populations, and how genetic structure can both affect how populations respond to stressor exposure, and be affected by that exposure. The book argues for the importance of spatial considerations in population-level risk assessment. It describes approaches used to support decision-making in the fields of conservation biology and resource management. The book also discusses approaches for estimating parameters used by models that extrapolate responses measured at the organism-level of biological organization to population-level responses.
