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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.
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".
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]
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.
The ecological meaning of niche comes from the meaning of niche as a recess in a wall for a statue, [7] which itself is probably derived from the Middle French word nicher, meaning to nest. [ 8 ] [ 7 ] The term was coined by the naturalist Roswell Hill Johnson [ 9 ] but Joseph Grinnell was probably the first to use it in a research program in ...
Ecosystem services are ecologically mediated functional processes essential to sustaining healthy human societies. [6] Water provision and filtration, production of biomass in forestry, agriculture, and fisheries, and removal of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO 2) from the atmosphere are examples of ecosystem services essential to public health and economic opportunity.
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.
But the full complexity of the norm of reaction is a function, for each genotype, relating environmental factor to phenotypic trait. By controlling for or measuring actual environments across which monoclonal seeds are cultivated, one can concretely observe norms of reaction. Normal distributions, for example, are common. Of course, the ...