The Effect of Environmental Heterogeneity on Communities PDF Download

Author: Lea Heidrich
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: British Ecological Society. Symposium
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521549356
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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A wide-ranging review of the effects of heterogeneity on individuals, populations, communities and biodiversity.

Author: Michael J. Hutchings
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521549356
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The last decade has seen countless advances in the measurement and interpretation of the impacts of environmental heterogeneity upon organisms and ecological processes. This volume discusses the effects of environmental heterogeneity; the effects of spatial and temporal heterogeneity on individuals, populations, communities and biodiversity; and the management and conservation implications of environmental heterogeneity.

Author: British Ecological Society. Symposium
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780632057139
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Presents advances in the measurement and interpretation of the impacts of environmental heterogenity upon organisms and ecological processes. The 18 contributions from the March 1999 symposium discuss the effects of spatial and temporal heterogeneity on individuals, populations, communities and biodiversity; and the management and conservation implications of environmental heterogeneity. Topics include plant response to patchy soils, heterogeneity in plant quality and its impact on the population ecology of insect herbivores, and genetic variation and adaptation in tree populations. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Jurek Kolasa
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461230624
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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An attractive, promising, and frustrating feature of ecology is its complex ity, both conceptual and observational. Increasing acknowledgment of the importance of scale testifies to the shifting focus in large areas of ecology. In the rush to explore problems of scale, another general aspect of ecolog ical systems has been given less attention. This aspect, equally important, is heterogeneity. Its importance lies in the ubiquity of heterogeneity as a feature of ecological systems and in the number of questions it raises questions to which answers are not readily available. What is heterogeneity? Does it differ from complexity? What dimensions need be considered to evaluate heterogeneity ade quately? Can heterogeneity be measured at various scales? Is heterogeneity apart of organization of ecological systems? How does it change in time and space? What are the causes of heterogeneity and causes of its change? This volume attempts to answer these questions. It is devoted to iden tification of the meaning, range of applications, problems, and methodol ogy associated with the study of heterogeneity. The coverage is thus broad and rich, and the contributing authors have been encouraged to range widely in discussions and reflections. vi Preface The chapters are grouped into themes. The first group focuses on the conceptual foundations (Chapters 1-5). These papers exarnine the meaning of the term, historical developments, and relations to scale. The second theme is modeling population and interspecific interactions in hetero geneous environments (Chapters 6 and 7).

Author:
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387240896
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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This groundbreaking work connects the knowledge of system function developed in ecosystem ecology with landscape ecology's knowledge of spatial structure. The book elucidates the challenges faced by ecosystem scientists working in spatially heterogeneous systems, relevant conceptual approaches used in other disciplines and in different ecosystem types, and the importance of spatial heterogeneity in conservation resource management.

Author: Min Zhang
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 283251717X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Author: Mark E. Ritchie
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400831687
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Understanding and predicting species diversity in ecological communities is one of the great challenges in community ecology. Popular recent theory contends that the traits of species are "neutral" or unimportant to coexistence, yet abundant experimental evidence suggests that multiple species are able to coexist on the same limiting resource precisely because they differ in key traits, such as body size, diet, and resource demand. This book presents a new theory of coexistence that incorporates two important aspects of biodiversity in nature--scale and spatial variation in the supply of limiting resources. Introducing an innovative model that uses fractal geometry to describe the complex physical structure of nature, Mark Ritchie shows how species traits, particularly body size, lead to spatial patterns of resource use that allow species to coexist. He explains how this criterion for coexistence can be converted into a "rule" for how many species can be "packed" into an environment given the supply of resources and their spatial variability. He then demonstrates how this rule can be used to predict a range of patterns in ecological communities, such as body-size distributions, species-abundance distributions, and species-area relations. Ritchie illustrates how the predictions closely match data from many real communities, including those of mammalian herbivores, grasshoppers, dung beetles, and birds. This book offers a compelling alternative to "neutral" theory in community ecology, one that helps us better understand patterns of biodiversity across the Earth.

Author: John Francis McLaughlin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Predation
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Author: Mark Vellend
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691208999
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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A plethora of different theories, models, and concepts make up the field of community ecology. Amid this vast body of work, is it possible to build one general theory of ecological communities? What other scientific areas might serve as a guiding framework? As it turns out, the core focus of community ecology—understanding patterns of diversity and composition of biological variants across space and time—is shared by evolutionary biology and its very coherent conceptual framework, population genetics theory. The Theory of Ecological Communities takes this as a starting point to pull together community ecology's various perspectives into a more unified whole. Mark Vellend builds a theory of ecological communities based on four overarching processes: selection among species, drift, dispersal, and speciation. These are analogues of the four central processes in population genetics theory—selection within species, drift, gene flow, and mutation—and together they subsume almost all of the many dozens of more specific models built to describe the dynamics of communities of interacting species. The result is a theory that allows the effects of many low-level processes, such as competition, facilitation, predation, disturbance, stress, succession, colonization, and local extinction to be understood as the underpinnings of high-level processes with widely applicable consequences for ecological communities. Reframing the numerous existing ideas in community ecology, The Theory of Ecological Communities provides a new way for thinking about biological composition and diversity.