FORUM FORUM FORUM Population: a central concept for ecology?

When my colleague Mauricio Lima sent me the accompanying paper (Camus and Lima 2002) it rekindled my interest in an unfinished manuscript that attempts to address some of the questions and problems they pose. The ideas presented in this essay are based on the premise that ecology needs a central unifying concept upon which to build a coherent and practical discipline. I will argue that, from a practical point of view, the ‘‘population’’ is the most logical choice for that central concept and that, because of this, the concept requires a precise and unambiguous meaning. This leads me to propose a definition for ‘‘population’’ that, I think, has these qualities.