Capacity is the maximum sustainable output of a system. Ideas underpinning the carrying capacity concept have a long history dating at least to the end of the 18th century, when Malthus (q.v.) argued that global population was destined to exceed the ability of the world's food to sustain it. He suggested that the consequences of this were the ‘Malthusian checks’ of famine, disease and war. Similar, if somewhat more sophisticated, notions can be seen in recent attempts to calculate global limits to growth.
At a different scale, range managers embraced the concept in the form of the maximum number of stock that could be supported per unit of land. Managers of outdoor recreation areas have borrowed the concept and modified it to encompass both environmental and perceptual components. Thus, the carrying capacity of parks and protected areas has been defined as the maximum number of people that can use an area without an unacceptable change in the environment or an unacceptable decline in...
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© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Wall, G. (1999). Carrying capacity. In: Environmental Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_49
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_49
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