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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 ]
All species have limits of tolerance to abiotic factors. Too much or too little of anything can lower their survival and reproductive success and cause reduced fitness . Changes in temperature resulting from global warming , for example, may cause a species to change its geographical distribution northward.
Species distribution, or species dispersion, [1] is the manner in which a biological taxon is spatially arranged. [2] The geographic limits of a particular taxon's distribution is its range , often represented as shaded areas on a map.
A specialist species can thrive only in a narrow range of environmental conditions or has a limited diet. Most organisms do not all fit neatly into either group, however. Some species are highly specialized (the most extreme case being monophagous, eating one specific type of food ), others less so, and some can tolerate many different ...
The pygmy mammoth is an example of insular dwarfism, a case of Foster's rule, its unusually small body size an adaptation to the limited resources of its island home.. A biological rule or biological law is a generalized law, principle, or rule of thumb formulated to describe patterns observed in living organisms.
Ecological extinction is an example of a definitive point of no return. Ecological thresholds are often characterized by hysteresis, which means the dependence of the state of a system on the history of its state. Even when the change is not irreversible, the return path from altered to original state can be drastically different from the ...
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).
Thus, the nature of species interactions may shift with environmental conditions. Facilitation has a greater effect on plant interactions under environmental stress than competition. [9] Another example is the positive effects of facilitation on desert plants that face the effects of rising aridification.