ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the roles of abiotic and biotic factors, and their interactions, in shaping pike population structure. It explores how environmental factors affect the recruitment process, i.e., the annual supply of new individuals to the population, and move on to exploring how these effects propagate to later post-recruit life stages. The chapter discusses how environmental factors affect mortality and individual growth. It utilizes information from manipulations of environmental factors for understanding environmental effects on pike population processes. The chapter also explores biotic factors with important unique effects on pike recruitment. It discusses how processes like intraspecific competition, but also other factors, influence processes pertinent to the post-recruit population structure. Demographic population structure and composition in northern pike intimately link to individual-level processes. Pike population size and structure is driven by a multitude of interacting density-dependent and density-independent factors.
