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An environmental factor, ecological factor or eco factor is any factor, abiotic or biotic, that influences living organisms. [1] Abiotic factors include ambient temperature , amount of sunlight , air, soil, water and pH of the water soil in which an organism lives.
Shelford's law of tolerance is a principle developed by American zoologist Victor Ernest Shelford in 1911. It states that an organism's success is based on a complex set of conditions and that each organism has a certain minimum, maximum, and optimum environmental factor or combination of factors that determine success. [1]
The availability of the limiting resources (nitrogen and phosphorus in the above example) in the environment are equivalent. These requirements are interesting and controversial because they require any two species to share a certain environment (have overlapping requirement niches) but fundamentally differ the ways that they use (or "impact ...
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.
Example representation of the environmental factors characterizing the exposome. The exposome is a concept used to describe environmental exposures that an individual encounters throughout life, and how these exposures impact biology and health. It encompasses both external and internal factors, including chemical, physical, biological, and ...
External factors, also called state factors, control the overall structure of an ecosystem and the way things work within it, but are not themselves influenced by the ecosystem. On broad geographic scales, climate is the factor that "most strongly determines ecosystem processes and structure".
Although environmental gradients are comprised gradually changing and predictable patterns of an abiotic factor, there is strong interplay between both biotic-biotic factors as well as biotic-abiotic factors. For example, species abundance usually changes along environmental gradients in a more or less predictable way.
Ecological factors can include changes in the environmental conditions in which a species experiences, such as behavioral changes involving predation, predator avoidance, pollinator attraction, and foraging; as well as changes in mate choice due to sexual selection or communication systems.