Extinction threshold is a term used in conservation biology to explain the point at which a species, population or metapopulation, experiences an abrupt change in density or number because of an important parameter, such as habitat loss. It is at this critical value below which a species, population, or metapopulation, will go extinct, though this may take a long time for species just below the critical value, a phenomenon known as extinction debt.
Extinction thresholds are important to conservation biologists when studying a species in a population or metapopulation context because the colonization rate must be larger than then extinction rate, otherwise the entire entity will go extinct once it reaches the threshold.
Extinction thresholds are realized under a number of circumstances and the point in modeling them is to define the conditions that lead a population to extinction. Modeling extinction thresholds can explain the relationship between extinction threshold and habitat loss and habitat fragmentation.
Read more about Extinction Threshold: Mathematical Models, Other Factors
Famous quotes containing the words extinction and/or threshold:
“The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“One could love reason like an Encyclopaedist and still be favorably inclined toward mysticism. Throughout the ages, up to the eyes of van Gogh, when he looked at a coffee pot or a garden path, mysticism has expanded the human realm by all sorts of threshold experiences.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)