BIOL 151 Study Guide - Final Guide: Keystone Species, Ecological Study, Theoretical Ecology
Document Summary
Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with their environment. The central goal of ecology is to understand the distribution and abundance of organisms. To understand why organisms live where they do and in what numbers, biologists break ecology into several levels of analysis. In ecology, researchers work in five main levels: organisms, populations, communities, ecosystems, global (sometimes biomes) Organismal ecologists explore the morphological, physiological, and behavioural adaptations that allow individual organisms to live successfully in a particular area. Heat is transferred by conductive, convective, and radiative transfer: water moves by differential pressure, osmotic, and matric potential. Physiological adaptations that regulate heat and water all act to modify these components of heat and water transfer. Coming up with an idea for how a particular adaptation affects physiology is easy; actually demonstrating it empirically is quite difficult. A population is a group of individuals of the same species that lives in the same area at the same time.
