The DOI matches its Crossref record; 33 of the 33 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Genesis, History, and Limits of Carrying Capacity
Abstract
The concept of carrying capacity is employed in a remarkably wide range of disciplines and debates, and it has been forcefully critiqued within numerous fields. Yet its historical origins remain obscure. I identify four major types of uses of carrying capacity: (1) as a mechanical or engineered attribute of manufactured objects or systems, beginning around 1840 in the context of international shipping; (2) as an attribute of living organisms and natural systems, beginning in the 1870s and most fully developed in range and game management early in the twentieth century; (3) as K, the intrinsic limit of population increase in organisms, used by population biologists since the mid-twentieth century; and (4) as the number of humans the earth can support, employed by neo-Malthusians, also since midcentury. All four uses persist to the present, although the first has been largely supplanted by other terms such as payload. In all cases, carrying capacity has been conceived as ideal, static, and numerical—characteristics that were appropriate in the first case but increasingly untenable as the concept was extended to systems of larger scale, greater variability, and lesser human control.
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The interaction of human population, food production, and biodiversity protection
Crist, E., Mora, C., & Engelman, R. (2017) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aal2011 · Cited by 733
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Intervention: Critical physical geography
Lave, R., Wilson, M. W., Barron, E. S., Biermann, C., Carey, M. A., Duvall, C. S., Johnson, L., Lane, K. M., McClintock, N., Munroe, D., et al. (2014) · Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes · doi:10.1111/cag.12061 · Cited by 291
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Sayre, N. F.
- Venue
- Annals of the Association of American Geographers
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2008-02-05
- Volume
- 98
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 120-134
- ISSN
- 0004-5608 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8306
- OpenAlex
- W1983962627
- Cited by
- 259
- References
- 33
- FWCI
- 30.20
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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