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An ecotone may be narrow or wide, and it may be local (the zone between a field and forest) or regional (the transition between forest and grassland ecosystems). [3] An ecotone may appear on the ground as a gradual blending of the two communities across a broad area, or it may manifest itself as a sharp boundary line.
By this view, the topography in the ball-and-cup model is not static, as it is in the community perspective. This is a fundamental difference between the two perspectives. Although the mechanisms of community and ecosystem perspectives are different, the empirical evidence required for documentation of alternative stable states is the same. In ...
Gleason argued that species distributions responded individualistically to environmental factors, and communities were best regarded as artifacts of the juxtaposition of species distributions. Gleason's ideas, first published in 1926, were largely ignored until the late 1950s. Two quotes illustrate the contrasting views of Clements and Gleason.
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.
Animals that colonize tend to be those that require two or more habitats, such as white-tailed and mule deer, elk, cottontail rabbits, blue jays, and robins. [citation needed] Some animals travel between habitats, while edge species are restricted to edges. Larger patches have increased native species biodiversity compared to smaller patches. [7]
One example of primary succession takes place after a volcano has erupted. The lava flows into the ocean and hardens into new land. The resulting barren land is first colonized by pioneer organisms, like algae, which pave the way for later, less hardy plants, such as hardwood trees, by facilitating pedogenesis, especially through the biotic acceleration of weathering and the addition of ...
The WUI was the fastest-growing land use type in the United States between 1990 and 2010. Factors include geographic population shifts, expansion of cities and suburbs into wildlands, and vegetative growth into formerly unvegetated land. The primary cause has been migration. Of new WUI areas, 97% were the result of new housing. [4]
Biotic homogenization is the process by which two or more spatially distributed ecological communities become increasingly similar over time. This process may be genetic, taxonomic, or functional, and it leads to a loss of beta (β) diversity. [1]