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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 ]
Tolerance Model. In this case, new pioneer species neither inhibit nor facilitate the growth and success of other species. The sequences of succession are thus entirely dependent on life-history characteristics such as the specific amount of energy a species allocates to growth. [3]
The Gaia hypothesis states that there is an emergent feedback loop generated by the metabolism of living organisms that maintains the core temperature of the Earth and atmospheric conditions within a narrow self-regulating range of tolerance. [48]
Ecological threshold is the point at which a relatively small change or disturbance in external conditions causes a rapid change in an ecosystem. When an ecological threshold has been passed, the ecosystem may no longer be able to return to its state by means of its inherent resilience .
This ultimately links the structure of these ecological networks to the behaviour of individual organisms. [6] Degree distribution: the degree distribution of an ecological network is the cumulative distribution for the number of links each species has. The degree distributions of food webs have been found to display the same universal ...
In this ecological context, hysteresis refers to the existence of different stable states under the same variables or parameters. Hysteresis can be explained by "path-dependency", in which the equilibrium point for the trajectory of "A → B" is different from for "B → A". In other words, it matters which way the ball is moving across the ...
Primary succession is the beginning step of ecological succession where species known as pioneer species colonize an uninhabited site, which usually occurs in an environment devoid of vegetation and other organisms. In contrast, secondary succession occurs on substrates that previously supported vegetation before an ecological disturbance. This ...
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).