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A keystone species is a species which 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.
Kelp forests are underwater areas with a high density of kelp, which covers a large part of the world's coastlines. Smaller areas of anchored kelp are called kelp beds. They are recognized as one of the most productive and dynamic ecosystems on Earth. Although algal kelp forest combined with coral reefs only cover 0.1% of Earth's total surface, they account for 0.9% of global primary productivity. Kelp forests occur worldwide throughout temperate and polar coastal oceans. In 2007, kelp forests were also discovered in tropical waters near Ecuador.
An apex predator, also known as a top predator, is a predator at the top of a food chain, without natural predators of its own.
Simon Asher Levin is an American ecologist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the director of the Center for BioComplexity at Princeton University. He specializes in using mathematical modeling and empirical studies in the understanding of macroscopic patterns of ecosystems and biological diversities.
Trophic cascades are powerful indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems, occurring when a trophic level in a food web is suppressed. For example, a top-down cascade will occur if predators are effective enough in predation to reduce the abundance, or alter the behavior of their prey, thereby releasing the next lower trophic level from predation.
An ecological cascade effect is a series of secondary extinctions that are triggered by the primary extinction of a key species in an ecosystem. Secondary extinctions are likely to occur when the threatened species are: dependent on a few specific food sources, mutualistic, or forced to coexist with an invasive species that is introduced to the ecosystem. Species introductions to a foreign ecosystem can often devastate entire communities, and even entire ecosystems. These exotic species monopolize the ecosystem's resources, and since they have no natural predators to decrease their growth, they are able to increase indefinitely. Olsen et al. showed that exotic species have caused lake and estuary ecosystems to go through cascade effects due to loss of algae, crayfish, mollusks, fish, amphibians, and birds. However, the principal cause of cascade effects is the loss of top predators as the key species. As a result of this loss, a dramatic increase of prey species occurs. The prey is then able to overexploit its own food resources, until the population numbers decrease in abundance, which can lead to extinction. When the prey's food resources disappear, they starve and may go extinct as well. If the prey species is herbivorous, then their initial release and exploitation of the plants may result in a loss of plant biodiversity in the area. If other organisms in the ecosystem also depend upon these plants as food resources, then these species may go extinct as well. An example of the cascade effect caused by the loss of a top predator is apparent in tropical forests. When hunters cause local extinctions of top predators, the predators' prey's population numbers increase, causing an overexploitation of a food resource and a cascade effect of species loss. Recent studies have been performed on approaches to mitigate extinction cascades in food-web networks.
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) Coastal Science Campus consists of five main institutions: UCSC's Long Marine Laboratory, UCSC's Coastal Biology Building, the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center, the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and the California Marine Wildlife Veterinary Care and Research Center. The physical location of the campus is at the western end of Santa Cruz, California, roughly 10 minutes away from UCSC's main campus, and is located adjacent to the Younger Lagoon Reserve. Walking trails exist throughout the campus and are used by area residents for walking, biking, and bird watching.
Ecological extinction is "the reduction of a species to such low abundance that, although it is still present in the community, it no longer interacts significantly with other species".
Samuel Joseph McNaughton is an American ecologist and professor at Syracuse University. He received his Ph.D. at University of Texas-Austin in 1964, and was tenured to Syracuse University in 1966.
The balance of nature, also known as ecological balance, is a theory that proposes that ecological systems are usually in a stable equilibrium or homeostasis, which is to say that a small change will be corrected by some negative feedback that will bring the parameter back to its original "point of balance" with the rest of the system. The balance is sometimes depicted as easily disturbed and delicate, while other times it is inversely portrayed as powerful enough to correct any imbalances by itself. The concept has been described as "normative", as well as teleological, as it makes a claim about how nature should be: nature is balanced because "it is supposed to be balanced".
John Whittle Terborgh is a James B. Duke Professor of Environmental Science at Duke University and Co-Director of the Center for Tropical Conservation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and for the past thirty-five years, has been actively involved in tropical ecology and conservation issues. An authority on avian and mammalian ecology in Neotropical forests, Terborgh has published numerous articles and books on conservation themes. Since 1973, he has operated the Cocha Cashu Biological Station, a tropical ecology research station in Manú National Park, Peru.
Overexploitation, also called overharvesting, refers to harvesting a renewable resource to the point of diminishing returns. Continued overexploitation can lead to the destruction of the resource, as it will be unable to replenish. The term applies to natural resources such as water aquifers, grazing pastures and forests, wild medicinal plants, fish stocks and other wildlife.
Robert Treat "Bob" Paine III was an American ecologist who spent most of his career at the University of Washington. Paine coined the keystone species concept to explain the relationship between Pisaster ochraceus, a species of starfish, and Mytilus californianus, a species of mussel.
Mary Eleanor Power is an ecology professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Power is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the California Academy of Sciences. She holds an honorary doctorate from Umeå University, Sweden, and is a recipient of the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, and the Kempe Award for Distinguished Ecologists (2004).
Anthony Ronald Entrican Sinclair is a professor emeritus of zoology at the University of British Columbia.
The Serengeti Rules is a 2018 American documentary film directed by Nicolas Brown, and based on the book by Sean B. Carroll. The film explores the discoveries of five pioneering scientists—Tony Sinclair, Mary E. Power, Bob Paine, John Terborgh, and Jim Estes—whose decades of research laid the groundwork for modern ecology and offer hope that environmentalists today may be able to “upgrade” damaged ecosystems by understanding the rules that govern them.
Timothy M. Caro is a British evolutionary ecologist known for his work on conservation biology, animal behaviour, anti-predator defences in animals, and the function of zebra stripes. He is the author of several textbooks on these subjects.
Derek Lee is an American ecologist and wildlife biologist specializing in population biology and conservation biology. Lee was born in Lodi, California on March 15, 1971, and attended Tokay High School. Lee earned his bachelor's degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara, his master's degree from Humboldt State University, and his Ph.D. from Dartmouth College. For his MS degree he investigated the migratory behavior of black brant geese in Humboldt Bay using capture-recapture statistics to estimate stopover duration and space use. For his Ph.D., he studied the spatial demography of giraffes in the Tarangire ecosystem of Tanzania. His academic work on climate influences on marine bird demography, spotted owls and forest fire, and computer vision applications to wildlife biology are highly cited. His discovery of a white leucistic giraffe was widely reported in popular media.
Jean H. Langenheim was an American plant ecologist and ethnobotanist, highly respected as an eminent scholar and a pioneer for women in the field. She has done field research in arctic, tropical, and alpine environments across five continents, with interdisciplinary research that spans across the fields of chemistry, geology, and botany. Her early research helped determine the plant origins of amber and led to her career-long work investigating the chemical ecology of resin-producing trees, including the role of plant resins for plant defense and the evolution of several resin-producing trees in the tropics. She wrote what is regarded as the authoritative reference on the topic: Plant Resins: Chemistry, Evolution, Ecology, and Ethnobotany, published in 2003.
Merav Ben-David is an Israeli-American ecologist, zoologist, and politician who is the Chair of the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming. She was the Democratic nominee in the 2020 United States Senate election in Wyoming, losing to former Congresswoman Cynthia Lummis in the general election. She ran for State Representative from Wyoming's 46th district in 2022.
References
- ↑ Lubchenco, Jane (18 May 2016). "Ecology: The sea-otter whisperer". Nature. 533 (7603): 318–319. Bibcode:2016Natur.533..318L. doi: 10.1038/533318a .
- ↑ "James Estes". www.nasonline.org. National Academy of Sciences.
- ↑ "'The Serengeti Rules': Film Review". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 2019-06-06.
