Biology 3445F Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Spatial Scale, Functional Group, Operational Taxonomic Unit
24 Jul 2014
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Mechanisms: where they occur, why they occur, and how many. Typically talk about these 4 levels in ecology. Community: multiple species occurring in a given location, interacting, with emergent patterns occurring from it. Population and ecosystem levels can feedback into the community hierarchal level. Species do more than just coexist. Spatial scale: just because they are infrequently interacting doesn"t mean that it isn"t biologically important. Delineation of a community: geographically (i. e. old field, boreal forest, taxonomically (plant community, bird, insect etc. Lawton 1999: community ecology is so messy, there are so many problems, we should just quit. Ended up spurring ecologists on, caused them to address more problems due to outrage, Niche vs. neutral: processes that are deterministic in nature vs. random events (stochastic) Basic unit of a community is a species (a construct, delineate what a species). Morpho- type: things that look the same.
