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Mutualism describes the ecological interaction between two or more species where each species has a net benefit. Mutualism is a common type of ecological interaction, one that can come from a parasitic interaction. Prominent examples include most vascular plants engaged in mutualistic interactions with mycorrhizae, flowering plants being pollinated by animals, vascular plants being dispersed by animals, and corals with zooxanthellae, among many others. Mutualism can be contrasted with interspecific competition, in which each species experiences reduced fitness, and exploitation, or parasitism, in which one species benefits at the expense of the other.
Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area. Phytogeography is the branch of biogeography that studies the distribution of plants. Zoogeography is the branch that studies distribution of animals. Mycogeography is the branch that studies distribution of fungi, such as mushrooms.
A pollinator is an animal that moves pollen from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma of a flower. This helps to bring about fertilization of the ovules in the flower by the male gametes from the pollen grains.
Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on natural and social sciences, and the practice of natural resource management.
Pollination is the transfer of pollen from an anther of a plant to the stigma of a plant, later enabling fertilisation and the production of seeds, most often by an animal or by wind. Pollinating agents can be animals such as insects, for example beetles; birds, butterflies, and bats; water; wind; and even plants themselves. Pollinating animals travel from plant to plant carrying pollen on their bodies in a vital interaction that allows the transfer of genetic material critical to the reproductive system of most flowering plants. When self-pollination occurs within a closed flower. Pollination often occurs within a species. When pollination occurs between species, it can produce hybrid offspring in nature and in plant breeding work.
Habitat fragmentation describes the emergence of discontinuities (fragmentation) in an organism's preferred environment (habitat), causing population fragmentation and ecosystem decay. Causes of habitat fragmentation include geological processes that slowly alter the layout of the physical environment, and human activity such as land conversion, which can alter the environment much faster and causes the extinction of many species. More specifically, habitat fragmentation is a process by which large and contiguous habitats get divided into smaller, isolated patches of habitats.
Insular biogeography or island biogeography is a field within biogeography that examines the factors that affect the species richness and diversification of isolated natural communities. The theory was originally developed to explain the pattern of the species–area relationship occurring in oceanic islands. Under either name it is now used in reference to any ecosystem that is isolated due to being surrounded by unlike ecosystems, and has been extended to mountain peaks, seamounts, oases, fragmented forests, and even natural habitats isolated by human land development. The field was started in the 1960s by the ecologists Robert H. MacArthur and E. O. Wilson, who coined the term island biogeography in their inaugural contribution to Princeton's Monograph in Population Biology series, which attempted to predict the number of species that would exist on a newly created island.
The SLOSS debate was a debate in ecology and conservation biology during the 1970's and 1980's as to whether a single large or several small (SLOSS) reserves were a superior means of conserving biodiversity in a fragmented habitat. Since its inception, multiple alternate theories have been proposed. There have been applications of the concept outside of the original context of habitat conservation.
Island gigantism, or insular gigantism, is a biological phenomenon in which the size of an animal species isolated on an island increases dramatically in comparison to its mainland relatives. Island gigantism is one aspect of the more general "island effect" or "Foster's rule", which posits that when mainland animals colonize islands, small species tend to evolve larger bodies, and large species tend to evolve smaller bodies. This is itself one aspect of the more general phenomenon of island syndrome which describes the differences in morphology, ecology, physiology and behaviour of insular species compared to their continental counterparts. Following the arrival of humans and associated introduced predators, many giant as well as other island endemics have become extinct. A similar size increase, as well as increased woodiness, has been observed in some insular plants such as the Mapou tree in Mauritius which is also known as the "Mauritian baobab" although it is member of the grape family (Vitaceae).
Species richness, or biodiversity, increases from the poles to the tropics for a wide variety of terrestrial and marine organisms, often referred to as the latitudinal diversity gradient. The latitudinal diversity gradient is one of the most widely recognized patterns in ecology. It has been observed to varying degrees in Earth's past. A parallel trend has been found with elevation, though this is less well-studied.
In conservation biology, latent extinction risk is a measure of the potential for a species to become threatened.
An ecological network is a representation of the biotic interactions in an ecosystem, in which species (nodes) are connected by pairwise interactions (links). These interactions can be trophic or symbiotic. Ecological networks are used to describe and compare the structures of real ecosystems, while network models are used to investigate the effects of network structure on properties such as ecosystem stability.
The Theory of Island Biogeography is a 1967 book by the ecologist Robert MacArthur and the biologist Edward O. Wilson. It is widely regarded as a seminal work in island biogeography and ecology. The Princeton University Press reprinted the book in 2001 as a part of the "Princeton Landmarks in Biology" series. The book popularized the theory that insular biota maintain a dynamic equilibrium between immigration and extinction rates. The book also popularized the concepts and terminology of r/K selection theory.
Changes in long term environmental conditions that can be collectively coined climate change are known to have had enormous impacts on current plant biodiversity patterns; further impacts are expected in the future. Environmental conditions play a key role in defining the function and geographic distributions of plants, in combination with other factors, thereby modifying patterns of biodiversity. It is predicted that climate change will remain one of the major drivers of biodiversity patterns in the future. Climate change is thought to be one of several factors causing biodiversity loss, which is changing the distribution and abundance of many plants.
A biological network is a method of representing systems as complex sets of binary interactions or relations between various biological entities. In general, networks or graphs are used to capture relationships between entities or objects. A typical graphing representation consists of a set of nodes connected by edges.
Ecological fitting is "the process whereby organisms colonize and persist in novel environments, use novel resources or form novel associations with other species as a result of the suites of traits that they carry at the time they encounter the novel condition". It can be understood as a situation in which a species' interactions with its biotic and abiotic environment seem to indicate a history of coevolution, when in actuality the relevant traits evolved in response to a different set of biotic and abiotic conditions.
Evolving digital ecological networks are webs of interacting, self-replicating, and evolving computer programs that experience the same major ecological interactions as biological organisms. Despite being computational, these programs evolve quickly in an open-ended way, and starting from only one or two ancestral organisms, the formation of ecological networks can be observed in real-time by tracking interactions between the constantly evolving organism phenotypes. These phenotypes may be defined by combinations of logical computations that digital organisms perform and by expressed behaviors that have evolved. The types and outcomes of interactions between phenotypes are determined by task overlap for logic-defined phenotypes and by responses to encounters in the case of behavioral phenotypes. Biologists use these evolving networks to study active and fundamental topics within evolutionary ecology.
A pollination network is a bipartite mutualistic network in which plants and pollinators are the nodes, and the pollination interactions form the links between these nodes. The pollination network is bipartite as interactions only exist between two distinct, non-overlapping sets of species, but not within the set: a pollinator can never be pollinated, unlike in a predator-prey network where a predator can be depredated. A pollination network is two-modal, i.e., it includes only links connecting plant and animal communities.
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. While the term is sometimes used interchangeably with "taxonomic homogenization", "functional homogenization", and "genetic homogenization", biotic homogenization is actually an overarching concept that encompasses the other three. This phenomenon stems primarily from two sources: extinctions of native and invasions of nonnative species. While this process pre-dates human civilization, as evidenced by the fossil record, and still occurs due to natural impacts, it has recently been accelerated due anthropogenic pressures. Biotic homogenization has become recognized as a significant component of the biodiversity crisis, and as such has become of increasing importance to conservation ecologists.
Megalocnidae is an extinct family of sloths, native to the islands of the Greater Antilles from the Early Oligocene to the Mid-Holocene. They are known from Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, but are absent from Jamaica. While they were formerly placed in the Megalonychidae alongside two-toed sloths and ground sloths like Megalonyx, recent mitochondrial DNA and collagen sequencing studies place them as the earliest diverging group basal to all other sloths. They displayed significant diversity in body size and lifestyle, with Megalocnus being terrestrial and probably weighing several hundred kilograms, while Neocnus was likely arboreal and similar in weight to extant tree sloths, at less than 10 kilograms.
References
- ↑ Patterson and Atmar; Patterson, Bruce D. (1993). "The measure of order and disorder in the distribution of species in fragmented habitat". Oecologia . 96 (3): 373–382. Bibcode:1993Oecol..96..373A. doi:10.1007/BF00317508. PMID 28313653. S2CID 12177277.
- ↑ Rodríguez-Gironés MA, Santamaría L (2006). "A new algorithm to calculate the nestedness temperature of presence–absence matrices". Journal of Biogeography. 33 (5): 924–935. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2006.01444.x. S2CID 84989243.
- ↑ Guimarães, P. R., P. Guimarães (2006). "Improving the analyses of nestedness for large sets of matrices". Environmental Modelling and Software. 21 (10): 1512–1513. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2006.04.002.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ Rodriguez-Girones, Miguel A.; Santamaria, Luis (2006). "A new algorithm to calculate the nestedness temperature of presence-absence matrices". Journal of Biogeography. 33 (5): 924–935. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2699.2006.01444.x. S2CID 84989243.
- ↑ Guimaraesjr, P.; Guimaraes, P. (2006). "Improving the analyses of nestedness for large sets of matrices". Environmental Modelling. 21 (10): 1512–1513. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2006.04.002.
- ↑ http://www.iemss.org/shortcom/software/software.php?aid=201%5B%5D
- ↑ Bastolla U, Fortuna MA, Pascual-García A, Ferrera A, Luque B, Bascompte J (2009). "The architecture of mutualistic networks minimizes competition and increases biodiversity". Nature. 458 (7241): 1018–1020. Bibcode:2009Natur.458.1018B. doi:10.1038/nature07950. PMID 19396144. S2CID 4395634.
- ↑ Johnson S, Domínguez-García V, Muñoz MA (2013). "Factors Determining Nestedness in Complex Networks". PLOS ONE. 8 (9): e74025. arXiv: 1307.4685 . Bibcode:2013PLoSO...874025J. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0074025 . PMC 3777946 . PMID 24069264.