Week 12 Monday Flashcards
What is biogeography?
The science that attempts to document and understand spatial patterns of biodiversity
What is Macroecology?
A way of studying relationships between organisms and their environment that involves characterizing and explaining statistical patterns of abundance, distribution and diversity; exploring the domain where ecology biogeography, paleontology, and macroevolution come together
What does macroecology and biogeography do?
Provides a description for the distribution of lifeforms over geographical areas, both in past and present times
what does macroecology and biogeography do for us?
- helps us understand how life became broadly distributed on the planet
- generates insight into the origins of these distributions allows us to then examine
— How communities were assembled
— The interactions that drive population dynamics
— Individual ecology of species and the ecological drivers of evolutions and adaptation
When using dispersal, where you move can depend on what?
- mode of dispersal
- range of tolerance
- availability of niches
- potential to adapt
what is Island biogeography?
a field of study that examines the factors affecting the species richness and diversification of isolated natural communities
what is the number of species on an island based on?
Immigration and extinction rate of species on said island
what factors impact the rates of immigration and extinction on an island?
- distance of the island from the mainland
- size of the island
what is the generalized idea of the equilibrium model of island biogeography?
- Species are more likely to colonize nearer islands than farther islands
- Larger islands have higher immigration rates than smaller islands
- Larger islands have lower extinction rates than smaller islands
What is ecological niche modeling?
A class of computational methods that use occurrence data in conjunction with environmental data to make a correlative model of the environmental conditions that meet a species’ ecological requirements and predict the relative suitability of habitat.
what is the aim of the ecological niche modelling?
To recreate the relationships between species and the environments where they occur and allow us to identify unexplored areas in geography where these species might be present
what is the Ecological Niche Modelling(ENM) also known as?
- Species Distribution Modelling (SDM)
- Habitat modelling (HM)
- Predictive habitat distribution modelling (PHDM)
- Range mapping (RM)
what can these (SDM, ENM, HM, PHDM, RM) be used for?
- Predict the potential distribution of species that are rare, hard to find, or in remote areas
- To examine where species were or should be
