Final answer:
Limiting factors to population growth, including resource scarcity like food and space, prevent exponential growth and lead to a population leveling off at the carrying capacity.
Step-by-step explanation:
Limiting factors to population growth prevent a population from producing a J-shaped growth curve. When resources such as food or space become scarce, populations can no longer sustain exponential growth and instead exhibit logistic growth, which is an S-shaped curve. The carrying capacity, or the maximum population size an environment can support, is determined by these limiting factors. As a population reaches its carrying capacity, the growth rate slows down, and the population size levels off, highlighting the ceiling effect imposed by the environment's resources.