Limiting factors determine the carrying capacity of an ecosystem by controlling the availability and accessibility of essential resources such as food, water, and space. These factors can be abiotic (non-living, like temperature, sunlight, water) or biotic (living, like food competition, predators, disease) and they regulate the population size that an ecosystem can sustainably support over time. When these resources become limited, population growth slows down or declines, establishing the maximum population size the environment can maintain, known as the carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is thus set by the balance between population size and available resources, with increases in limiting factors leading to reduced carrying capacity. Additionally, limiting factors can be density-dependent, where their effect intensifies as population size increases (e.g., competition for food), or density-independent, where their impact is unrelated to population density (e.g., natural disasters). Changes in these factors directly influence the carrying capacity, which is not fixed but varies with environmental conditions and interactions among species in the ecosystem.
