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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. [1] [2] [3] For plants key resources are light, nutrients, water, and space to
Natural resources can be a substantial part of a country's wealth; [7] however, a sudden inflow of money caused by a resource extraction boom can create social problems including inflation harming other industries ("Dutch disease") and corruption, leading to inequality and underdevelopment, this is known as the "resource curse".
Iron is required for life. [1] [2] [3] The iron–sulfur clusters are pervasive and include nitrogenase, the enzymes responsible for biological nitrogen fixation.Iron-containing proteins participate in transport, storage and use of oxygen. [1]
The framework centers around "consumer-resource models" which largely split a given ecosystem into resources (e.g. sunlight or available water in soil) and consumers (e.g. any living thing, including plants and animals), and attempts to define the scope of possible relationships that could exist between the two groups.
Oceans often act as renewable resources. Sawmill near Fügen, Zillertal, Austria Global vegetation. A renewable resource (also known as a flow resource [note 1] [1]) is a natural resource which will replenish to replace the portion depleted by usage and consumption, either through natural reproduction or other recurring processes in a finite amount of time in a human time scale.
When resources are limited, an increase in population size reduces the quantity of resources available for each individual, reducing the per capita fitness in the population. As a result, the growth rate of a population slows as intraspecific competition becomes more intense, making it a negatively density dependent process.
where N j is the density of species j, R is the density of the resource, a is the rate at which species j eats the resource, d is species js death rate, and r is the rate at which resources grow when not consumed. It is easy to show that when species j is at equilibrium by itself (i.e., dN j /dt = 0), that the equilibrium resource density, R* j, is
Resource competition can vary from completely symmetric (all individuals receive the same amount of resources, irrespective of their size, known also as scramble competition) to perfectly size symmetric (all individuals exploit the same amount of resource per unit biomass) to absolutely size asymmetric (the largest individuals exploit all the available resource).