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The biotic potential is the quantitative expression of the ability of a species to face natural selection in any environment. The main equilibrium of a particular population is described by the equation: Chapman also relates to a "vital index", regarding a ratio to find the rate of surviving members of a species, whereas; Vital Index = (number ...
Definition of size asymmetry. Resource competition can vary from completely symmetric (all individuals receive the same amount of resources, irrespective of their size, known also as scramble competition) to perfectly size symmetric (all individuals exploit the same amount of resource per unit biomass) to absolutely size asymmetric (the largest individuals exploit all the available resource).
Natural-resource meaning [:] An actual or potential form of wealth supplied by nature, as coal, oil, water power, timber, arable land, etc. A material source of wealth, such as timber, fresh water, or a mineral deposit, that occurs in a natural state and has economic value. Something, such as a forest, a mineral deposit, or fresh water, that is ...
Ecophysiology (from Greek οἶκος, oikos, "house (hold)"; φύσις, physis, "nature, origin"; and -λογία, -logia ), environmental physiology or physiological ecology is a biological discipline that studies the response of an organism 's physiology to environmental conditions. It is closely related to comparative physiology and ...
Environmental gradient. An environmental gradient, or climate gradient, is a change in abiotic (non-living) factors through space (or time). Environmental gradients can be related to factors such as altitude, depth, temperature, soil humidity and precipitation. Often times, a multitude of biotic (living) factors are closely related to these ...
Ecological niche. The flightless dung beetle occupies an ecological niche: exploiting animal droppings as a food source. In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. [1] [2] It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for example, by growing when ...
Biotic index. A biotic index is a scale for showing the quality of an environment by indicating the types and abundances of organisms present in a representative sample of the environment. It is often used to assess the quality of water in marine and freshwater ecosystems. Numerous biotic indices have been created to account for the indicator ...
Biological dispersal refers to both the movement of individuals ( animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, etc.) from their birth site to their breeding site ('natal dispersal'), as well as the movement from one breeding site to another ('breeding dispersal'). Dispersal is also used to describe the movement of propagules such as seeds and spores .