Ecology is the study of the relationships among living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history.
A herbivore is an animal anatomically and physiologically adapted to eating plant material, for example foliage or marine algae, for the main component of its diet. As a result of their plant diet, herbivorous animals typically have mouthparts adapted to rasping or grinding. Horses and other herbivores have wide flat teeth that are adapted to grinding grass, tree bark, and other tough plant material.
A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Another name for food web is consumer-resource system. Ecologists can broadly lump all life forms into one of two categories based on their trophic levels, the position it occupies in the food web: 1) the autotrophs, and 2) the heterotrophs. To maintain their bodies, grow, develop, and to reproduce, autotrophs produce organic matter from inorganic substances, including both minerals and gases such as carbon dioxide. These chemical reactions require energy, which mainly comes from the Sun and largely by photosynthesis, although a very small amount comes from bioelectrogenesis in wetlands, and mineral electron donors in hydrothermal vents and hot springs. These trophic levels are not binary, but form a gradient that includes complete autotrophs, which obtain their sole source of carbon from the atmosphere, mixotrophs, which are autotrophic organisms that partially obtain organic matter from sources other than the atmosphere, and complete heterotrophs that must feed to obtain organic matter.
A keystone species is a species that has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its abundance, a concept introduced in 1969 by the zoologist Robert T. Paine. Keystone species play a critical role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other organisms in an ecosystem and helping to determine the types and numbers of various other species in the community. Without keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether. Some keystone species, such as the wolf, are also apex predators.
In ecology, a biological interaction is the effect that a pair of organisms living together in a community have on each other. They can be either of the same species, or of different species. These effects may be short-term, or long-term, both often strongly influence the adaptation and evolution of the species involved. Biological interactions range from mutualism, beneficial to both partners, to competition, harmful to both partners. Interactions can be direct when physical contact is established or indirect, through intermediaries such as shared resources, territories, ecological services, metabolic waste, toxins or growth inhibitors. This type of relationship can be shown by net effect based on individual effects on both organisms arising out of relationship.
Ecological dominance is the degree to which one or several species have a major influence controlling the other species in their ecological community or make up more of the biomass. Both the composition and abundance of species within an ecosystem can be affected by the dominant species present.
A food chain is a linear network of links in a food web starting from producer organisms and ending at an apex predator species, detritivores, or decomposer species. A food chain also shows how organisms are related to each other by the food they eat. Each level of a food chain represents a different trophic level. A food chain differs from a food web because the complex network of different animals' feeding relations are aggregated and the chain only follows a direct, linear pathway of one animal at a time. Natural interconnections between food chains make it a food web.
Mark D. Bertness is an American ecologist, known for his work on the community assembly of marine shoreline communities.
The term stable isotope has a meaning similar to stable nuclide, but is preferably used when speaking of nuclides of a specific element. Hence, the plural form stable isotopes usually refers to isotopes of the same element. The relative abundance of such stable isotopes can be measured experimentally, yielding an isotope ratio that can be used as a research tool. Theoretically, such stable isotopes could include the radiogenic daughter products of radioactive decay, used in radiometric dating. However, the expression stable-isotope ratio is preferably used to refer to isotopes whose relative abundances are affected by isotope fractionation in nature. This field is termed stable isotope geochemistry.
Carla Cáceres is a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign known for her research in population, community and evolutionary ecology, focusing on the origins, maintenance, and functional significance of biodiversity within ecosystems. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America, and the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography
Energy, nutrients, and contaminants derived from aquatic ecosystems and transferred to terrestrial ecosystems are termed aquatic-terrestrial subsidies or, more simply, aquatic subsidies. Common examples of aquatic subsidies include organisms that move across habitat boundaries and deposit their nutrients as they decompose in terrestrial habitats or are consumed by terrestrial predators, such as spiders, lizards, birds, and bats. Aquatic insects that develop within streams and lakes before emerging as winged adults and moving to terrestrial habitats contribute to aquatic subsidies. Fish removed from aquatic ecosystems by terrestrial predators are another important example. Conversely, the flow of energy and nutrients from terrestrial ecosystems to aquatic ecosystems are considered terrestrial subsidies; both aquatic subsidies and terrestrial subsidies are types of cross-boundary subsidies. Energy and nutrients are derived from outside the ecosystem where they are ultimately consumed.
Christiaan Both is a Dutch Associate professor of ecology at the University of Groningen.
Nancy Huntly is an American ecologist based at Utah State University, where she is a Professor in the Department of Biology and director of the USU Ecology Center. Her research has been on biodiversity, herbivory, and long-term human ecology. She started her position at USU in 2011, after serving as a Program Officer in the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation. Prior to that she was a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University (Pocatello).
Elizabeth T. Borer is an American ecologist and a professor of ecology, Evolution and Behavior in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota.
Victoria Louise Sork is an American scientist who is Professor and Dean of Life Sciences at University of California, Los Angeles. She studies tree populations in California and the Eastern United States using genomics, evolutionary biology and conservation biology. Sork is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Ingrid C. "Indy" Burke is the Carl W. Knobloch, Jr. Dean at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. She is the first female dean in the school's 116 year history. Her area of research is ecosystem ecology with a primary focus on carbon cycling and nitrogen cycling in semi-arid rangeland ecosystems. She teaches on subjects relating to ecosystem ecology, and biogeochemistry.
Eco-evolutionary dynamics refers to the reciprocal effects that ecology and evolution have on each other. The effects of ecology on evolutionary processes are commonly observed in studies, but the realization that evolutionary changes can be rapid led to the emergence of eco-evolutionary dynamics. The idea that evolutionary processes can occur quickly and on one timescale with ecological processes led scientists to begin studying the influence evolution has on ecology along with the affects ecology has on evolution. Recent studies have documented eco-evolutionary dynamics and feedback, which is the cyclic interaction between evolution and ecology, in natural and laboratory systems at different levels of biological organization, such as populations, communities, and ecosystems.
The Hynes Award for New Investigators is awarded by the Society for Freshwater Science and recognizes an excellent academic research paper in the freshwater sciences by a scientist less than five years after their terminal graduate degree. Recipients of the award have gone on to become leading senior researchers, serving as science advisors to various governments and states, and held leadership positions in national and international scientific societies.
The stable isotope composition of amino acids refers to the abundance of heavy and light non-radioactive isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, and other elements within these molecules. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. They are synthesized from alpha-keto acid precursors that are in turn intermediates of several different pathways in central metabolism. Carbon skeletons from these diverse sources are further modified before transamination, the addition of an amino group that completes amino acid biosynthesis. Bonds to heavy isotopes are stronger than bonds to light isotopes, making reactions involving heavier isotopes proceed slightly slower in most cases. This phenomenon, known as a kinetic isotope effect, gives rise to isotopic differences between reactants and products that can be detected using isotope ratio mass spectrometry. Amino acids are synthesized via a variety of pathways with reactions containing different, unknown isotope effects. Because of this, the 13C content of amino acid carbon skeletons varies considerably between the amino acids. There is also an isotope effect associated with transamination, which is apparent from the abundance of 15N in some amino acids.
Carol Anne Blanchette is research biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who is known for her work on marine intertidal zones and the biomechanics of marine organisms.
