Life 57- Community Ecology Flashcards
Gross primary production
The amount of energy captured by the primary producers in a community
Food chain
A portion of a food web, most commonly a simple sentence of prey species and the predators that consume them
Shannon diversity index
A formula for quantifying diversity that takes both species richness and species evenness into account; based on a mathematical expression of the certainty with which the next item sampled in a series can be predicted.
Primary succession
Succession that begins in an area initially devoid of life, such as on recently exposed glacial till or lava flows
Sorenson’s Index
Mathematical formula that measures beta diversity
Primary consumer
An organism (herbivore) that eats plant tissues
Community
Any ecologically integrated group of species of microorganisms, plants, and animals inhabiting a given area.
Trophic cascade
The progression over successively lower trophic levels of the indirect effects of a predator.
Food web
The complete set of food links between species in a community; a diagram indicating which ones are the eaters and which are eaten
Net primary production
The amount of primary producer biomass made available for consumption by heterotrophs
Beta diversity
Between-habitat diversity; a measure of the change in species composition from one community or habitat to another
Climax community
The final stage of succession; a community that is capable of perpetuating itself under local climatic and soil conditions and persists for a relatively long time.
Gross primary productivity (GPP)
The rate at which the primary producers in a community turn solar energy into stored chemical energy via photosynthesis
Species richness
The total number of species living in a region
Monoculture
In agriculture, a large-scale planting of a single species of domesticated crop plant
Secondary succession
Succession after a disturbance that did not eliminate all the organisms originally living on the time
Secondary consumer
An organism that eat primary consumers
Island biogeography
A theory proposing that the number of species on an island (or in another geographically defined and isolated area) represents a balance, or equilibrium, between the rate at which species immigrate to the island and the rate at which resident species go extinct.
Ecosystem engineer
An organism that builds structures that alter existing habitats or create new habitats
Species-area relationship
The relationship between the size of an area and the numbers of species it supports.
Facilitation
In succession, modification of the environment by a colonising species in a way that allows colonisation by other species
Succession
The gradual, sequential series of changes in a species composition of a community following a disturbance
Trophic level
A group of organisms United by obtaining their energy from the same part of the food web of a biological community
Keystone species
Species that have a dominant influence on the composition of a community
