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Scaling Pattern Of Occupancy
In spatial ecology and macroecology, scaling pattern of occupancy (SPO), also known as the area-of-occupancy (AOO) is the way in which species distribution changes across spatial scales. In physical geography and image analysis, it is similar to the modifiable areal unit problem. Simon A. Levin (1992) states that ''the problem of relating phenomena across scales is the central problem in biology and in all of science''. Understanding the SPO is thus one central theme in ecology. Pattern description This pattern is often plotted as log-transformed grain (cell size) versus log-transformed occupancy. Kunin (1998) presented a log-log linear SPO and suggested a fractal nature for species distributions. It has since been shown to follow a logistic shape, reflecting a percolation process. Furthermore, the SPO is closely related to the intraspecific occupancy-abundance relationship. For instance, if individuals are randomly distributed in space, the number of individuals in an ''α'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spatial Ecology
Spatial ecology studies the ultimate distributional or spatial unit occupied by a species. In a particular habitat shared by several species, each of the species is usually confined to its own microhabitat or spatial niche because two species in the same general territory cannot usually occupy the same ecological niche for any significant length of time. Overview In nature, organisms are neither distributed uniformly nor at random, forming instead some sort of spatial pattern. This is due to various energy inputs, disturbances, and species interactions that result in spatially patchy structures or gradients. This spatial variance in the environment creates diversity in communities of organisms, as well as in the variety of the observed biological and ecological events. The type of spatial arrangement present may suggest certain interactions within and between species, such as competition, predation, and reproduction. On the other hand, certain spatial patterns may also rule ou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taylor's Law
Taylor's power law is an empirical law in ecology that relates the variance of the number of individuals of a species per unit area of habitat to the corresponding mean by a power law relationship. It is named after the ecologist who first proposed it in 1961, Lionel Roy Taylor (1924–2007). Taylor's original name for this relationship was the law of the mean. The name ''Taylor's law'' was coined by Southwood in 1966. Definition This law was originally defined for ecological systems, specifically to assess the spatial clustering of organisms. For a population count Y with mean \mu and variance \operatorname (Y), Taylor's law is written : \operatorname (Y) = a\mu^b, where ''a'' and ''b'' are both positive constants. Taylor proposed this relationship in 1961, suggesting that the exponent ''b'' be considered a species specific index of aggregation. This power law has subsequently been confirmed for many hundreds of species. Taylor's law has also been applied to assess the time ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IUCN Red List Of Ecosystems
The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) is a global framework for monitoring and documenting the status of ecosystems. It was developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature for biodiversity risk assessment. Its main objectives are to support conservation, resource use, and management decisions by evaluating all the world's ecosystems by 2025. The Red List of Ecosystem was developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the same entity that created the Red List of Threatened Species, a global framework to monitor the level of risk of animal and plant species. With the help of RLE and its partner organizations, many governments and organizations create national and regional red lists, generally based on the IUCN categories and criteria, to classify the ecosystems under threat within their territorial limits. History The Red List of Ecosystems was created to carry out assessments of biodiversity at a level of biological organization above ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IUCN Red List
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, also known as the IUCN Red List or Red Data Book, founded in 1964, is the world's most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species. It uses a set of precise criteria to evaluate the extinction risk of thousands of species and subspecies. These criteria are relevant to all species and all regions of the world. With its strong scientific base, the IUCN Red List is recognized as the most authoritative guide to the status of biological diversity. A series of Regional Red Lists are produced by countries or organizations, which assess the risk of extinction to species within a political management unit. The aim of the IUCN Red List is to convey the urgency of conservation issues to the public and policy makers, as well as help the international community to reduce species extinction. According to IUCN the formally stated goals of the Red List are to provi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ecosystem Collapse
An ecosystem is considered collapsed when its unique biotic (characteristic biota) or abiotic features are lost from all previous occurrences. Ecosystem collapse causes ecological collapse within a system; essentially altering its stability, resilience, and diversity levels. It is, however, possible to reverse through careful restoration, and is thus not completely equivalent to species extinction. It occurs after a system has reached a so-called ecological 'tipping point', or crossed a critical threshold, and can no longer adequately respond to rapid changes in ecological conditions; either due to the suddenness or the scale of the changes. It is important to note that—while certain types of accelerated ecosystem collapse or mass ecosystem collapse are typically viewed in a negative light—rapid environmental change and collapse have always been an integral part of the evolution and dynamics of the biosphere and marine ecosystems throughout geologic time. These processes hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Co-occurrence
In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of occurrence of two terms (also known as coincidence or concurrence) from a text corpus alongside each other in a certain order. Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense can be interpreted as an indicator of semantic proximity or an idiomatic expression. Corpus linguistics and its statistic analyses reveal patterns of co-occurrences within a language and enable to work out typical collocations for its lexical items. A ''co-occurrence restriction'' is identified when linguistic elements never occur together. Analysis of these restrictions can lead to discoveries about the structure and development of a language. Co-occurrence can be seen an extension of word counting in higher dimensions. Co-occurrence can be quantitatively described using measures like correlation or mutual information. See also * Distributional hypothesis * Statistical semantics * Co-occurrence matrix * Co-occurrence networks Co-oc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Autocorrelation
Autocorrelation, sometimes known as serial correlation in the discrete time case, is the correlation of a signal with a delayed copy of itself as a function of delay. Informally, it is the similarity between observations of a random variable as a function of the time lag between them. The analysis of autocorrelation is a mathematical tool for finding repeating patterns, such as the presence of a periodic signal obscured by noise, or identifying the missing fundamental frequency in a signal implied by its harmonic frequencies. It is often used in signal processing for analyzing functions or series of values, such as time domain signals. Different fields of study define autocorrelation differently, and not all of these definitions are equivalent. In some fields, the term is used interchangeably with autocovariance. Unit root processes, trend-stationary processes, autoregressive processes, and moving average processes are specific forms of processes with autocorrelation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fractal
In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. This exhibition of similar patterns at increasingly smaller scales is called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry; if this replication is exactly the same at every scale, as in the Menger sponge, the shape is called affine self-similar. Fractal geometry lies within the mathematical branch of measure theory. One way that fractals are different from finite geometric figures is how they scale. Doubling the edge lengths of a filled polygon multiplies its area by four, which is two (the ratio of the new to the old side length) raised to the power of two (the conventional dimension of the filled polygon). Likewise, if the radius of a filled sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conservation Biology
Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on natural and social sciences, and the practice of natural resource management. The conservation ethic is based on the findings of conservation biology. Origins The term conservation biology and its conception as a new field originated with the convening of "The First International Conference on Research in Conservation Biology" held at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California, in 1978 led by American biologists Bruce A. Wilcox and Michael E. Soulé with a group of leading university and zoo researchers and conservationists including Kurt Benirschke, Sir Otto Frankel, Thomas Lovejoy, and Jared Diamond. The meeting was prompted due to concern over tropical deforestation, disappe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biodiversity
Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic (''genetic variability''), species (''species diversity''), and ecosystem (''ecosystem diversity'') level. Biodiversity is not distributed evenly on Earth; it is usually greater in the tropics as a result of the warm climate and high primary productivity in the region near the equator. Tropical forest ecosystems cover less than 10% of earth's surface and contain about 90% of the world's species. Marine biodiversity is usually higher along coasts in the Western Pacific, where sea surface temperature is highest, and in the mid-latitudinal band in all oceans. There are latitudinal gradients in species diversity. Biodiversity generally tends to cluster in hotspots, and has been increasing through time, but will be likely to slow in the future as a primary result of deforestation. It encompasses the evolutionary, ecological, and cultural ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cang Hui
Cang Hui () is a mathematical ecologist at Stellenbosch University. His research interests are proposing models and theories for explaining emerging patterns of biodiversity, networks and adaptive traits in ecology and evolution. Background Hui was born in Xi'an and received his BSc (1998) in Applied Mathematics from Xi'an Jiaotong University, his MSc (2001) in Applied Mathematics from Lanzhou University, and his PhD (2004) in Mathematical Ecology from the same university. Hui was a Researcher at thDST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biologyfrom 2008 to 2013, and has remained a Core-Team Member of the center since. Hui was appointed Visiting Professor in the MOE Key Laboratory of Western China's Environmental Systems (also known as the Research School of Arid Environment & Climate Change) from 2006 to 2009 and Adjunct Professor since 2011 at Lanzhou University. In January 2014, Hui was promoted to Full Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metapopulation
A metapopulation consists of a group of spatially separated populations of the same species which interact at some level. The term metapopulation was coined by Richard Levins in 1969 to describe a model of population dynamics of insect pests in agricultural fields, but the idea has been most broadly applied to species in naturally or artificially fragmented habitats. In Levins' own words, it consists of "a population of populations". A metapopulation is generally considered to consist of several distinct populations together with areas of suitable habitat which are currently unoccupied. In classical metapopulation theory, each population cycles in relative independence of the other populations and eventually goes extinct as a consequence of demographic stochasticity (fluctuations in population size due to random demographic events); the smaller the population, the more chances of inbreeding depression and prone to extinction. Although individual populations have finite life-s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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