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Plants and other sessile organisms are disproportionately affected by some types of habitat fragmentation because they cannot respond quickly to the altered spatial configuration of the habitat. [12] Habitat fragmentation consistently reduces biodiversity by 13 to 75% and impairs key ecosystem functions by decreasing biomass and altering ...
Niche construction. Beavers hold a very specific biological niche in the ecosystem: constructing dams across river systems. Niche construction is the ecological process by which an organism alters its own (or another species') local environment. These alterations can be a physical change to the organism’s environment, or it can encompass the ...
Spirogyra (common names include water silk, mermaid's tresses, and blanket weed) is a genus of filamentous charophyte green algae of the order Zygnematales, named for the helical or spiral arrangement of the chloroplasts that is characteristic of the genus. Spirogyra species, of which there are more than 400, are commonly found in freshwater ...
Also called range fragmentation, disjunct distributions may be caused by changes in the environment, such as mountain building and continental drift or rising sea levels; it may also be due to an organism expanding its range into new areas, by such means as rafting, or other animals transporting an organism to a new location (plant seeds consumed by birds and animals can be moved to new ...
The species–area relationship is usually constructed for a single type of organism, such as all vascular plants or all species of a specific trophic level within a particular site. It is rarely if ever, constructed for all types of organisms if simply because of the prodigious data requirements. It is related but not identical to the species ...
Biodiversity loss happens when plant or animal species disappear completely from Earth (extinction) or when there is a decrease or disappearance of species in a specific area. Biodiversity loss means that there is a reduction in biological diversity in a given area. The decrease can be temporary or permanent.
In ecology, edge effects are changes in population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats. [ 1 ] Areas with small habitat fragments exhibit especially pronounced edge effects that may extend throughout the range. As the edge effects increase, the boundary habitat allows for greater biodiversity.
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 ...