BIOC50H3 Lecture 14: Lecture Fourteen
22 Dec 2018
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Document Summary
Ecological: ecologists focus on factors that operate over short time scales to influence diversity within local habitats or regions. Evolutionary: on the scale of million of years, extinction, adaption, speciation, climate change and geological change create the potential for entirely different assemblages of species to evolve. Integrated approaches: ultimately speciation is what causes biodiversity to arise, extinction causes biodiversity to decline, ecology often has a large effect on both of these processes. Knowledge of the fossil is incomplete therefore we have biased sampling; this provides a coarse time scale. Our sampling of the fossil record is not even at all time periods; therefore, we have better understanding of the levels of biodiversity at some time periods than others. Geological strata generally become difficult to locate the further back in time we go due to erosion: paleontologists have statistical methods to correct for sampling effort in different strata to correct for these issues.
