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Resource (biology)
In biology and ecology, a resource is a substance or object in the environment required by an organism for normal growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Resources can be consumed by one organism and, as a result, become unavailable to another organism. For plants key resources are light, nutrients, water, and space to grow. For animals key resources are food, water, and territory. Key resources for plants Terrestrial plants require particular resources for photosynthesis and to complete their life cycle of germination, growth, reproduction, and dispersal: * Carbon dioxide * Microsite (ecology) * Nutrients * Pollination * Seed dispersal * Soil * Water Key resources for animals Animals require particular resources for metabolism and to complete their life cycle of gestation, birth, growth, and reproduction:Smith, T.M., and R.L. Smith. 2008. Elements of ecology, 7th ed. Benjamin Cummings, San Francisco, CA. * Foraging * Territory * Water Resources and ecological processes R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biology
Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and distribution of life. Central to biology are five fundamental themes: the cell (biology), cell as the basic unit of life, genes and heredity as the basis of inheritance, evolution as the driver of biological diversity, energy transformation for sustaining life processes, and the maintenance of internal stability (homeostasis). Biology examines life across multiple biological organisation, levels of organization, from molecules and cells to organisms, populations, and ecosystems. Subdisciplines include molecular biology, physiology, ecology, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, and systematics, among others. Each of these fields applies a range of methods to investigate biological phenomena, including scientific method, observation, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Water
Water is an inorganic compound with the chemical formula . It is a transparent, tasteless, odorless, and Color of water, nearly colorless chemical substance. It is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living organisms (in which it acts as a solvent). It is vital for all known forms of life, despite not providing food energy or organic micronutrients. Its chemical formula, , indicates that each of its molecules contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, connected by covalent bonds. The hydrogen atoms are attached to the oxygen atom at an angle of 104.45°. In liquid form, is also called "water" at standard temperature and pressure. Because Earth's environment is relatively close to water's triple point, water exists on Earth as a solid, a liquid, and a gas. It forms precipitation in the form of rain and aerosols in the form of fog. Clouds consist of suspended droplets of water and ice, its solid state. When finely divided, crystalline ice ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plant Ecology
Plant ecology is a subdiscipline of ecology that studies the distribution and abundance (ecology), abundance of plants, the effects of environmental factors upon the abundance of plants, and the interactions among plants and between plants and other organisms. Examples of these are the distribution of temperate deciduous forests in North America, the effects of drought or flooding upon plant survival, and competition among desert plants for water, or effects of herds of grazing animals upon the composition of grasslands. A global overview of the Earth's major vegetation types is provided by O.W. Archibold. He recognizes 11 major vegetation types: tropical forests, tropical savannas, arid regions (deserts), Mediterranean ecosystems, temperate forest ecosystems, temperate grasslands, coniferous forests, tundra (both polar and high mountain), terrestrial wetlands, freshwater ecosystems and coastal/marine systems. This breadth of topics shows the complexity of plant ecology, sinc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Population Ecology
Population ecology is a sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment (biophysical), environment, such as birth rate, birth and death rates, and by immigration and emigration. The discipline is important in conservation biology, especially in the development of population viability analysis which makes it possible to predict the long-term probability of a species persisting in a given patch of habitat. Although population ecology is a subfield of biology, it provides interesting problems for mathematicians and statistics, statisticians who work in population dynamics. History In the 1940s, ecology was divided into autecology—the study of individual species in relation to the environment—and Community ecology, synecology—the study of groups of species in relation to the environment. The term autecology (from Ancient Greek language, Ancient Greek: :wikt:αὐτο, αὐτο, ''aúto'', "self"; ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ecology
Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history. Ecology is a branch of biology, and is the study of abundance (ecology), abundance, biomass (ecology), biomass, and distribution of organisms in the context of the environment. It encompasses life processes, interactions, and adaptations; movement of materials and energy through living communities; ecological succession, successional development of ecosystems; cooperation, competition, and predation within and between species; and patterns of biodiversity and its effect on ecosystem processes. Ecology has practical applications in fields such as conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Community Ecology
In ecology, a community is a group or association of populations of two or more different species occupying the same geographical area at the same time, also known as a biocoenosis, biotic community, biological community, ecological community, or life assemblage. The term community has a variety of uses. In its simplest form it refers to groups of organisms in a specific place or time, for example, "the fish community of Lake Ontario before industrialization". Community ecology or synecology is the study of the interactions between species in communities on many spatial and temporal scales, including the distribution, structure, abundance, demography, and interactions of coexisting populations. The primary focus of community ecology is on the interactions between populations as determined by specific genotypic and phenotypic characteristics. It is important to understand the origin, maintenance, and consequences of species diversity when evaluating community ecology. Comm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biotic Component
An ecosystem (or ecological system) is a system formed by organisms in interaction with their environment. The biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Ecosystems are controlled by external and internal factors. External factors—including climate—control the ecosystem's structure, but are not influenced by it. By contrast, internal factors control and are controlled by ecosystem processes; these include decomposition, the types of species present, root competition, shading, disturbance, and succession. While external factors generally determine which resource inputs an ecosystem has, their availability within the ecosystem is controlled by internal factors. Ecosystems are dynamic, subject to periodic disturbances and always in the process of recovering from past disturbances. The tendency of an ecosystem to remain close to its equilibrium state, is termed its resistance. Its capacity to absorb disturbance and reorga ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Abiotic Component
In biology and ecology, abiotic components or abiotic factors are non-living chemical and physical parts of the environment that affect living organisms and the functioning of ecosystems. Abiotic factors and the phenomena associated with them underpin biology as a whole. They affect a plethora of species, in all forms of environmental conditions, such as marine or terrestrial animals. Humans can make or change abiotic factors in a species' environment. For instance, fertilizers can affect a snail's habitat, or the greenhouse gases which humans utilize can change marine pH levels. Abiotic components include physical conditions and non-living resources that affect living organisms in terms of growth, maintenance, and reproduction. Resources are distinguished as substances or objects in the environment required by one organism and consumed or otherwise made unavailable for use by other organisms. Component degradation of a substance occurs by chemical or physical processes, e. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Niche Differentiation
In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. Three variants of ecological niche are described by It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for example, by growing when resources are abundant, and when predators, parasites and pathogens are scarce) and how it in turn alters those same factors (for example, limiting access to resources by other organisms, acting as a food source for predators and a consumer of prey). "The type and number of variables comprising the dimensions of an environmental niche vary from one species to another ndthe relative importance of particular environmental variables for a species may vary according to the geographic and biotic contexts". See also Chapter 2: Concepts of niches, pp. 7 ''ff'' A Grinnellian niche is determined by the habitat in which a species lives and its accompanying behavioral adaptations. An Eltonian niche emphasizes that a specie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liebig's Law Of The Minimum
Liebig's law of the minimum, often simply called Liebig's law or the law of the minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Carl Sprengel (1840) and later popularized by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is dictated not by total resources available, but by the scarcest resource (limiting factor). The law has also been applied to biological populations and ecosystem models for factors such as sunlight or mineral nutrients. Applications This was originally applied to plant or crop growth, where it was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not increase plant growth. Only by increasing the amount of the limiting nutrient (the one most scarce in relation to "need") was the growth of a plant or crop improved. This principle can be summed up in the aphorism, "The availability of the most abundant nutrient in the soil is only as good as the availability of the least abundant nutrient in the soil." Or the rough analog, "A chain is only as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Competition (biology)
Competition is an Biological interaction, interaction between organisms or species in which both require one or more Resource (biological), resources that are in Limiting factor, limited supply (such as food, water, or Territory (animal), territory). Competition lowers the Fitness (biology), fitness of both organisms involved since the presence of one of the organisms always reduces the amount of the resource available to the other. In the study of community ecology, competition within and between members of a species is an important biological interaction. Competition is one of many interacting Biotic component, biotic and Abiotic component, abiotic factors that affect Community (ecology), community structure, species diversity, and population dynamics (shifts in a population over time). There are three major Mechanism (biology), mechanisms of competition: interference, exploitation, and apparent competition (in order from most direct to least direct). Interference and exploitat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carrying Capacity
The carrying capacity of an ecosystem is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which in population ecology corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration). Carrying capacity of the environment implies that the resources extraction is not above the rate of regeneration of the resources and the wastes generated are within the assimilating capacity of the environment. The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics is modelled with a logistic function. Carrying capacity is applied to the maximum population an environment can support in ecology, agriculture and fisheries. The term carrying capacity had been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being appl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
