Biology 2483A Chapter 19: Species Diversity in Communities

• School: Western University
• Department: Biology
• Course: Biology 2483A
• Professor: Hugh Henry

Document Summary

Introduction (cid:120) what is the importance of species diversity: functional reasons: (cid:131) more redundancy, so if one species goes extinct than it won"t suffer the community as much if the community wasn"t as diverse. If only one species holds a single function, then it could alter how the community works entirely. Recall in the jelly fish that were moved from one area of the sea to another. Zebra mussels made it into the fresh water systems in ontario and they spread very quickly. How can we explain high species diversity vs. low species diversity? (cid:120) resource partitioning: competing species coexist by using resources in different ways. In a simple model, each species" resource use lies on a spectrum of available resources: any kind of gradient in the resources (ie. seed size) Each distribution represents the use by a single species. - narrower species: narrow the range in the spectrum to get more specialized individuals along the same gradient.