Population Viability Analysis And Its Application In The Dynamics Of Père David's Deer(Elaphurus Davidianus) Population

Population viability analysis is an important tool of wildlife conservation and ecological risk analysis. Both conservation biologists and population ecologists pay attention to it because of its elaborating and quantitativity. The thesis introduces the basic ideas of population viability analysis and analyzes the viability of Père David's deer population in Dafeng Nature Reserve and wild Père David's deer populations. We mainly obtain the following conclusions:1), By analyzing the viability of deer populations in Dafeng Nature Reserve using exponential growth model directly and by dividing different stages, we find that the current population is density dependent and will reach carrying capacity in 2016 -2017, when the number of the population is approximately 1200. Increasing the areas of Nature Reserve is one of the important measures of protecting Père David's deer populations.2), From the research on population viability with count-based PVA, we find that the finite population growth rate is 1.1757 and the probability of eventual extinction of the population is almost to 0 with the extinction threshold of 10.3), By calculating the population structure and elasticity of vital rates on deterministic stage-classified projection matrix model, we find that the elasticity of adult survival rate is the highest. Therefore, reducing the death of adult will be very beneficial to maintain the current growth trend and restore wild Père David's deer population.4), The stochastic exponential growth model shows that stochastic factors have a significant impact on wild Père David's deer population dynamics. The probability of extinction increase gradually as the variance increases. It has little effect on the probability of extinction for continuing stock a small number of deer if the variance of growth rate is unchanged.5), we calculate the wild population doubling time is 10 years with birth-death process model when the birth rate is 16.3% and the death rate is 17.3%. At the same time, the population doubling time on 95% confidential level is also calculated with different fertility and mortality.