Ecology: The fruits of local knowledge

All organisms have a position within an ecosystem. The complete set of living and nonliving factors—including food resources, climate, and terrain—that define the position of a given organism are collectively referred to as the organism’s ecological niche.

To understand intra-specific interactions in populations, scientists measure the spatial arrangement of species individuals. This geographic arrangement is known as the species distribution or dispersion. Highly territorial species exhibit a uniform distribution pattern, in which individuals are spaced at relatively equal distances from one another. Species that are highly tied to particular resources, such as food or shelter, tend to concentrate around those resources, and thus exhibit a...

If you want to understand how behavior occurs, one of the best ways to gain information is to simply observe the behavior in its natural context. However, people might change their behavior in unexpected ways if they know they are being observed. How do researchers obtain accurate information when people tend to hide their natural behavior? As an example, imagine that your professor asks everyone in your class to raise their hand if they always wash their hands after using the restroom. Chances...

Habitat fragmentation describes the division of a more extensive, continuous habitat into smaller, discontinuous areas. Human activities such as land conversion, as well as slower geological processes leading to changes in the physical environment, are the two leading causes of habitat fragmentation. The fragmentation process typically follows the same steps: perforation, dissection, fragmentation, shrinkage, and attrition.

Overview

Biodiversity describes the variety of living things at multiple organizational levels: genetic, species and ecosystem diversity. Species diversity includes all branches of the evolutionary tree from single-celled prokaryotic organisms, bacteria, and archaea, to the eukaryotic kingdoms: plants; animals; fungi; and protists. To date, there have been about 1.75 million species identified, and new species are discovered every week.