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Ecology is a branch of biology concerning the spatial and temporal patterns of the distribution and abundance of organisms, including the causes and consequences. Topics of interest include the biodiversity, distribution, biomass, and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species. Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living components of their environment. Ecosystem processes, such as primary production, pedogenesis, nutrient cycling, and niche construction, regulate the flux of energy and matter through an environment. These processes are sustained by organisms with specific life history traits.
The unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography is a theory and the title of a monograph by ecologist Stephen Hubbell. The hypothesis aims to explain the diversity and relative abundance of species in ecological communities. Like other neutral theories of ecology, Hubbell assumes that the differences between members of an ecological community of trophically similar species are "neutral", or irrelevant to their success. This implies that niche differences do not influence abundance and the abundance of each species follows a random walk. The theory has sparked controversy, and some authors consider it a more complex version of other null models that fit the data better.
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.
Restoration ecology is the scientific study supporting the practice of ecological restoration, which is the practice of renewing and restoring degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems and habitats in the environment by active human intervention and action. Effective restoration requires an explicit goal or policy, preferably an unambiguous one that is articulated, accepted, and codified. Restoration goals reflect societal choices from among competing policy priorities, but extracting such goals is typically contentious and politically challenging.
The Holarctic realm is the name for the biogeographic realm that encompasses the majority of habitats found throughout the northern continents of the world, combining Alfred Wallace's Palearctic zoogeographical region, consisting of North Africa and all of Eurasia, and the Nearctic zoogeographical region, consisting of North America, north of Mexico.
The intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH) suggests that local species diversity is maximized when ecological disturbance is neither too rare nor too frequent. At low levels of disturbance, more competitive organisms will push subordinate species to extinction and dominate the ecosystem. At high levels of disturbance, due to frequent forest fires or human impacts like deforestation, all species are at risk of going extinct. According to IDH theory, at intermediate levels of disturbance, diversity is thus maximized because species that thrive at both early and late successional stages can coexist. IDH is a nonequilibrium model used to describe the relationship between disturbance and species diversity. IDH is based on the following premises: First, ecological disturbances have major effects on species richness within the area of disturbance. Second, interspecific competition results from one species driving a competitor to extinction and becoming dominant in the ecosystem. Third, moderate ecological scale disturbances prevent interspecific competition.
Spatial ecology studies the ultimate distributional or spatial unit occupied by a species. In a particular habitat shared by several species, each of the species is usually confined to its own microhabitat or spatial niche because two species in the same general territory cannot usually occupy the same ecological niche for any significant length of time.
Source–sink dynamics is a theoretical model used by ecologists to describe how variation in habitat quality may affect the population growth or decline of organisms.
Patch dynamics is an ecological perspective that the structure, function, and dynamics of ecological systems can be understood through studying their interactive patches. Patch dynamics, as a term, may also refer to the spatiotemporal changes within and among patches that make up a landscape. Patch dynamics is ubiquitous in terrestrial and aquatic systems across organizational levels and spatial scales. From a patch dynamics perspective, populations, communities, ecosystems, and landscapes may all be studied effectively as mosaics of patches that differ in size, shape, composition, history, and boundary characteristics.
Ecological traps are scenarios in which rapid environmental change leads organisms to prefer to settle in poor-quality habitats. The concept stems from the idea that organisms that are actively selecting habitat must rely on environmental cues to help them identify high-quality habitat. If either the habitat quality or the cue changes so that one does not reliably indicate the other, organisms may be lured into poor-quality habitat.
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.
An ecological metacommunity is a set of interacting communities which are linked by the dispersal of multiple, potentially interacting species. The term is derived from the field of community ecology, which is primarily concerned with patterns of species distribution, abundance and interactions. Metacommunity ecology combines the importance of local factors and regional factors to explain patterns of species distributions that happen in different spatial scales.
In ecology, a priority effect is the impact that a particular species can have on community development due to prior arrival at a site.
Riparian-zone restoration is the ecological restoration of riparian-zonehabitats of streams, rivers, springs, lakes, floodplains, and other hydrologic ecologies. A riparian zone or riparian area is the interface between land and a river or stream. Riparian is also the proper nomenclature for one of the fifteen terrestrial biomes of the earth; the habitats of plant and animal communities along the margins and river banks are called riparian vegetation, characterized by Aquatic plants and animals that favor them. Riparian zones are significant in ecology, environmental management, and civil engineering because of their role in soil conservation, their habitat biodiversity, and the influence they have on fauna and aquatic ecosystems, including grassland, woodland, wetland or sub-surface features such as water tables. In some regions the terms riparian woodland, riparian forest, riparian buffer zone, or riparian strip are used to characterize a riparian zone.
In ecology, extinction debt is the future extinction of species due to events in the past. The phrases dead clade walking and survival without recovery express the same idea.
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. The simplest form of ecological fitting is resource tracking, in which an organism continues to exploit the same resources, but in a new host or environment. In this framework, the organism occupies a multidimensional operative environment defined by the conditions in which it can persist, similar to the idea of the Hutchinsonian niche. In this case, a species can colonize new environments and/or form new species interactions which can lead to the misinterpretation of the relationship as coevolution, although the organism has not evolved and is continuing to exploit the same resources it always has. The more strict definition of ecological fitting requires that a species encounter an environment or host outside of its original operative environment and obtain realized fitness based on traits developed in previous environments that are now co-opted for a new purpose. This strict form of ecological fitting can also be expressed either as colonization of new habitat or the formation of new species interactions.
Flowering synchrony is the amount of overlap between flowering periods of plants in their mating season compared to what would be expected to occur randomly under given environmental conditions. A population which is flowering synchronously has more plants flowering at the same time than would be expected to occur randomly. A population which is flowering asynchronously has fewer plants flowering at the same time than would be expected randomly. Flowering synchrony can describe synchrony of flowering periods within a year, across years, and across species in a community. There are fitness benefits and disadvantages to synchronized flowering, and it is a widespread phenomenon across pollination syndromes.
Catherine H. Graham is a team leader and senior scientist working on the Biodiversity & Conservation Biology, and the Spatial Evolutionary Ecology research units at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL. From 2003 to 2017 she was an Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the Stony Brook University, and since her appointment at the WSL in 2017 she has maintained adjunct status there. She received both her M.S. degree (1995) and her Ph.D. (2000) from the University of Missouri at St. Louis, and did post-doctoral training at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. She studies biogeography, conservation biology, and ecology. Catherine H. Graham is most noted for her analysis of statistical models to describe species' distributions. This work with Jane Elith is useful in determining changes in biodiversity resulting from human activities. Her paper on niche conservatism with John J. Wiens is also highly cited. They focused on how species' retention of ancestral traits may limit geographic range expansion. In many of her papers, she has sought to unite ecology and evolutionary biology to derive a better understanding of the processes driving species diversity patterns. In particular, she and Paul Fine laid out a framework for interpreting community assembly processes from a phylogenetic approach to quantifying beta diversity.
Dark diversity is the set of species that are absent from a study site but present in the surrounding region and potentially able to inhabit particular ecological conditions.
Mark C. Urban is a biologist and associate professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. His work focuses on the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape natural communities across multiple spatial scales.
References
- ↑ Leibold, M. A.; Holyoak, M.; Mouquet, N.; Amarasekare, P.; Chase, J. M.; Hoopes, M. F.; Holt, R. D.; Shurin, J. B.; Law, R. (2004-06-04). "The metacommunity concept: a framework for multi-scale community ecology". Ecology Letters. 7 (7): 601–613. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2004.00608.x . ISSN 1461-023X.
- ↑ Székely, A.J.; Langenheder, S. (2013). "The importance of species sorting differs between habitat generalists and specialists in bacterial communities". FEMS Microbiology Ecology. 87 (1): 102–112. doi: 10.1111/1574-6941.12195 . PMID 23991811.