Title: Liebig's law of the minimum
Long Title: IUPAC Gold Book - Liebig's law of the minimum
DOI: 10.1351/goldbook.14794
Status: current

Definition
Observation that a population’s size (number of individuals or biomass) is limited by some essential factor in the environment that is scarce relative to the amount of other essential factors, e.g., phosphorus-limited algal growth in a lake.

Related Term
- population: https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/14932

Source
- PAC, 2009, 81, 829. 'Glossary of terms used in ecotoxicology (IUPAC Recommendations 2009)' on page 904 (https://doi.org/10.1351/PAC-REC-08-07-09)

Other Outputs
- html: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/14794/html
- json: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/14794/json
- xml: https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/14794/xml

Citation: Citation: 'Liebig's law of the minimum' in IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 5th ed. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; 2025. Online version 5.0.0, 2025. 10.1351/goldbook.14794
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Accessed: 2026-04-21T08:10:53+00:00