ENVS 1500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis, Ecological Niche, Species Richness

• School: York University
• Department: Environmental Studies
• Course: ENVS 1500
• Professor: Gail Fraser

Document Summary

Community: an association of interacting species inhabiting some defined area. Community structure: includes attributes such as the number of species, the relative abundance of species, and the kinds of species comprising a community. Community guilds: groups of organisms that all make their living in a similar way. Species diversity: (1) the number of species in the community, which ecologists calls species richness. (2) and the relative abundance of species, or species evenness. We can portray the relative abundance, dominance and diversity of species within a community by plotting the relative abundance of species against their rank in abundance. The result is known as the rank abundance curve. Environmental complexity: species diversity is higher in complex environments to understand this relationship is fundamental to understand species niches. The fundamental niche is the multi-dimensional set of condition an organism needs to survive.