Estimation of the growth rate of wild ungulate populations in the territory of the Saratov region by the dynamic series of their numbers

Abstract

The present paper is devoted to the study of the possibility of estimating the reproductive potentials of wild ungulate populations, and possibly other large mammals, by the time series of their numbers. We have found out that this is possible, which is confirmed by the high quality of approximation of the time series of abundance by logistic curves, and the corresponding coefficients of their determination for different species ranged from 75 to 96%. For such calculations, one circumstance is necessary, which is that the population of the studied species has been briefly exposed to some unfavorable factor causing a significant reduction in its numbers with subsequent restoration to the previous level, or the time series should contain a well-expressed and extended section of the transition of the population from some lower level to the upper level of the population, passing into a stationary state. The values of the maximum exponential growth rates of ungulate populations that we obtained do not fundamentally differ from the data available in other researchers’ works. In addition, it should be borne in mind that our method for assessing the reproductive potentials of ungulates is statistical, with features accompanying all such methods, for example, in the presence of statistical errors in all determined parameters. However, the evaluation of the magnitude of these errors is a topic for a separate study.