Use of biological invasions and their control to study the dynamics of interacting populations

Abstract

One of the difficulties of conservation biology is the general lack of experimental approaches. Because it is often unethical, or simply because this new discipline deals with small and/or fragile populations, experiments on those populations are not always feasible. As a result, the knowledge on population dynamics, when not dealing with laboratory populations of caged invertebrates, has often come from theoretical studies, with notable exceptions such as those based on of some populations isolated on particular islands (e.g., (Clutton-Brock and Coulson, 2002; Grenfell et al, 1998). However, one aspect that is often lacking from theoretical studies, as well as from natural isolated populations, is the interspecific dimension: in the above cases, it is rather exceptional to take into account more than two interacting populations. Yet, as we hope to show in this chapter, direct and indirect "complex" interspecific relationships may be the major ecological forces in some communities. They can thus be crucial for applied ecology as well as represent heuristic tools for students, and intellectual candies for functional ecologists. © 2006 Springer. All Rights Reserved.