BIOB50H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Trophic Cascade, Archaea, Vascular Plant
8 Sep 2017
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Complementarity hypothesis each species has an incremental effect on community function (all species are essential to healthy community); each species adds a little bit to community function so you would get a linear relationship. Redundancy hypothesis similar to complementarity, but assumes functional contributions of species reaches an upper limit, after which additional species are redundant; some species provide the same function as the others so the line plateaus. Driver and passenger hypothesis some species have strong effect on community function (drivers) and others have a negligible effect (passengers); adding drivers to community has much larger impact on functioning, producing stair step increases. Fourth model variation on driver and passenger, but assumes that drivers and passengers can overlap in their impacts on community function; adds redundancy to it so some functions of drivers and passengers can overlap. Ecosystems rely on autotrophs: autotrophs (aka primary producers) Form organic molecules through the reduction of inorganic carbon (nitrogen, phosphorous) obtained from physical environment.
