BIOB50H3 Lecture 16: BIOB50 Lecture 16
5 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Agents of change act on communities across all temporal and spatial scales. Example: communities on mount st. helens: devastation due to volcano eruption caused new habitats devoid of any living habitats, this natural experiment helped scientists tremendously to understand how succession works. Succession is change in species composition in communities over time. It results from both biotic and abiotic factors. Abiotic factors, in the form of climate, soils, nutrients, and water, vary over daily, seasonal, decadal, and even 100,000-year time scales. Abiotic agents of change can be categorized as: Disturbance: events that injure or kill some individuals and create opportunities for other individuals. Stress: abiotic factors that reduce growth, reproduction, or survival of individuals: abiotic and biotic factors often interact to produce community change. Example: an ecosystem engineer causes changes in abiotic conditions that. Agents of change vary in frequency and intensity result in species replacement.
