PNNL

Abstract

The impacts of human activities on our own and other populations on the plant are making news at an alarming pace. Global warming, ocean and freshwater contamination and acidification, deforestation, habitat destruction and incursion, and in general a burgeoning human population are associated with a complete spectrum of changes to the dynamics of populations. Effects on songbirds, insects, coral reefs, ocean mammals, anadromous fishes, just to name a few, and humans, have been linked to human industry and population growth. The linkage, however, remains often ghostly and often tenuous at best, because of the difficulty in quantitatively combining ecological processes with environmental fate and transport processes. Establishing quantitative tools, that is, models, for the combined dynamics of populations and environmental chemical/thermal things is needed. This truly interdisciplinary challenge is briefly reviewed, and two approaches to integrating chemical and biological intermingling are addressed in the context of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest.