BILD 3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Competitive Exclusion Principle, Interspecific Competition, Ecological Niche
Document Summary
Community ecology: community definitions and concepts, types of interspecific interactions, trophic structure, top-down and bottom-up control, diversity, the equilibrium theory of island biogeography. Is an assemblage of populations of various species living in close enough for potential interaction. Community concepts: contrasting views of community structure are the subject of continuing debate, two different views on community structure, emerged among ecologists in the 1920s and 1930s. Integrated hypotheses (clements: a community is an assemblage of closely linked species, locked into association by mandatory biotic interactions. Individualistic hypothesis (gleason: proposes that communities are loosely organized associations of independently distributed species with the same abiotic requirements. The individualistic hypothesis (gleason: predicts that each species is distributed according to its tolerance ranges for abiotic factors. In most studies, community composition change continuously, with each species more or less independently distributed. Interspecific interactions: populations in a community are potentially linked by interspecific interactions, a community"s interactions include competition, predation, herbivory, symbiosis, and disease.
