Countdown to 2011, Part II: Numbers

Although I find my thinking as a scientist, not to mention my work, has evolved over the past 5-7 years away from original training and interest in population biology much more toward the more complex arena of ecosystem ecology. That evolution began when I began to work on watershed and habitat issues, stepping beyond the single-species demographic studies that had dominated my doctoral and post-doctoral work. More recently, I find my interests moving further still toward the concept of social-ecological systems, which essentially means truly integrating the full complexity of the human species into ecosystem science. It's an exciting, albeit somewhat overwhelming, area, about which I have much to learn.

Still, I think there is still an important place for the more focused study of populations of individual species in their own right. From an applied point of view, single-species population biology will establish the conservation and management backstops guiding action when we find a species in dire straits, or is the species is sufficiently important (most likely economically, but perhaps culturally or ecologically as well) to warrant more focused attention. Moving toward ecosystem science and management involves trade-offs in what we factor into our understanding and decision-making. Specifically, we will generally pay less attention to the intricacies of individual species' biology, but factors in more of the external factors that also drive their dynamics yet are largely ignored by classical population biology. But population biology will be where we turn when a species needs special attention.

Also, in terms of my own personal satisfaction from scientific study, I find in-depth examination of population biology to be more gratifying because it allows one to know a species in a way that is almost intimate, uncovering the uniqueness and complexity that shape its numbers and place in the world. The study of populations is heavily grounded in numbers (growth and mortality rates, abundance and density, age and size structure), but taken together those numbers become something more, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. When I think about an area of the ocean from an ecosystem perspective, I consider a wide array of species interacting in that space. But each is somewhat anonymous, and I feel special affinity for those species I have studied in more depth (notably, the stripey bass that was the focus of my doctoral dissertation, and to a growing extent the humble alewife that inspired the name of this blog).

In any case, I have entered into this discussion of populations because two milestones in the population of our own humble species are at hand. Firstly, the U.S. Census Bureau recently released the results of the 2010 Census, announcing to the world that there are now 308,745,538 Americans. Frankly, that number seems low to me. For some reason, I thought we were up above the 350,000,000 mark.

Regardless, it's tough to know exactly what that number really means. Probably very little. What is more important is how that population is structured and distributed, not to mention how its members interact with one another and the world around us. In the coming weeks, I'll be poking around that site more deeply to see what interesting patterns lie in the data. And I won't be alone. Census data form the cornerstone of any number of analyses by government agencies from the local to federal level, non-governmental organizations, academicians and corporations (marketing...). Indeed, my guess is that the decadal U.S. census is the most widely used database in the world.

The second milestone is our global approach toward 7 billion people. Whoa. That number and scale is a bit too daunting to say much more about right now, but National Geographic has done an interesting exploration of its significance that is well worth checking out.

So many numbers, so little time!