Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Definition. The term habitat fragmentation includes five discrete phenomena: Reduction in the total area of the habitat. Decrease of the interior: edge ratio. Isolation of one habitat fragment from other areas of habitat. Breaking up of one patch of habitat into several smaller patches. Decrease in the average size of each patch of habitat.
Figure 1. Whittaker plot of species Rank abundance for 7 most commonly considered mechanistic models for niche apportionment. The models with steeper slopes such as the Dominance preemption model represents less even communities where a few species are highly abundant and the remaining species abundances decrease sharply (see Species evenness).
Habitat destruction. Map of the world's biodiversity hot spots, all of which are heavily threatened by habitat loss and degradation. Habitat destruction (also termed habitat loss and habitat reduction) occurs when a natural habitat is no longer able to support its native species. The organisms once living there have either moved to elsewhere or ...
Liebig's law has been extended to biological populations (and is commonly used in ecosystem modelling).For example, the growth of an organism such as a plant may be dependent on a number of different factors, such as sunlight or mineral nutrients (e.g., nitrate or phosphate).
Fragmentation is a very common type of vegetative reproduction in plants. Many trees, shrubs, nonwoody perennials, and ferns form clonal colonies by producing new rooted shoots by rhizomes or stolons, which increases the diameter of the colony. If a rooted shoot becomes detached from the colony, then fragmentation has occurred.
Ecological niche. The flightless dung beetle occupies an ecological niche: exploiting animal droppings as a food source. In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. [1][2] It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for example, by growing when ...
A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Ecologists can broadly define all life forms as either autotrophs or heterotrophs, based on their trophic levels, the position that they occupy in the food web.
Chloroplasts probably evolved following an endosymbiotic event between an ancestral, photosynthetic cyanobacterium and an early eukaryotic phagotroph. [17] This event (termed primary endosymbiosis) is at the origin of the red and green algae (including the land plants or Embryophytes which emerged within them) and the glaucophytes, which together make up the oldest evolutionary lineages of ...