Environmental resistance

Factors are all the things that keep a population of organisms from endlessly increasing. They lower
the chances for reproduction, affect the health of organisms, and raise the death rate in the population.
Environmental resistance factors include factors that are biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living). Biotic
factors are things like predation, parasitism, lack of food, competition with other organisms and disease.
Abiotic factors include drought, fire, temperature, and even the wrong amount of sunshine. You can see
how all these things, biotic and abiotic, would become an uphill battle to your boulder-pushing.

The Push and Pull of Populations

While environmental resistance acts like a hill pushing back against population growth,
biotic potential is what urges a population to grow. Biotic potential has to do with how well a
species can survive, including how well adapted it is to the environment and its rate of
reproduction. Some species produce a lot of young very often (while others produce fewer
babies less often), but invest a lot of energy raising and protecting them. So, while the biotic
potential of a species causes the population to increase, environmental resistance keeps it from
increasing relentlessly.

Environmental Resistance and Carrying Capacity

The factors that limit the biotic potential of an organism are called environmental resistance. These
factors include abiotic and biotic factors that limit the organism from endlessly increasing its population.

Examples of Environmental Resistance

Some of the common examples of environmental resistance include the availability of water and
predator-prey relationship.

Water is an important resource that producers need for growth. If the producers do not grow in an
ecosystem, then the consumers in such ecosystem cannot be sustained.

Dynamics of predator-prey populations contribute to environmental resistance. For instance, if the

predator population is low, we can expect that the prey’s population is high.

Biotic potential and environmental resistance affect the carrying capacity, which is defined as the
maximum population of a species an ecosystem can sustain indefinitely without being degraded due to
deterioration and damage.
We can analyse an ecosystem’s carrying capacity through this graph. The carrying capacity is the portion
of the graph in which the population plateaus; this is where the rate at which the replenished resources
of an ecosystem is equal to the number of organisms being born.

If the population exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, it is called an overshoot. One reason
for the overshoot is when the reproductive lag time — the time it takes for the birth rate to decrease and
the death rate to increase in response to limited resources, takes place. When this happens, a population
can collapse or dieback since there are limited resources and space unless a large number of individuals
migrate to other areas with more favorable conditions. When the population of the organisms is below
the carrying capacity, the available resources are able to sustain the needs of the population.

Tips

Biotic potential of organisms makes the population increase while environmental resistance limits the
population on growing relentlessly.

Environmental Resistance (ER)

• Environmental Resistance can be classified into two broad categories :

- Density-Dependent Factors

- Density-Independent Factors

DENSITY DEPENDENT FACTOR

* A factor that causes higher mortality or reduced birth rates as a population becomes more dense .

DENSITY-INTERDEPENDENT FACTOR

* Limit populations regardless of their density

Ex. Climate,Weather, Floods,Fire, Pollutants and overhunting