Abstract:Life table analyses, which are based on population age-structure, can yield average long-term projections of population growth or decline, but can‘t reveal the fluctuation in population size that results from stochastic perturbations. The stochastic perturbations can be classified into four kinds: demographic stochasticity, environmental stochasticity, natural catastrophes and genetic stochasticity. When a population is small and isolated from other populations, which belong to the same species, these rando...