Dark Diversity
Dark diversity is the set of species that are absent from a study site but present in the surrounding region and potentially able to inhabit particular ecological conditions. It can be determined based on species distribution, dispersal potential and ecological needs. The term was introduced in 2011 by three researchers from the University of Tartu and was inspired by the idea of dark matter in physics since dark diversity too cannot be directly observed. Overview Dark diversity is part of the species pool concept. A species pool is defined as set of all species that are able to inhabit a particular site and that are present in the surrounding region or landscape. Dark diversity comprises species that belong to a particular species pool but that are not currently present at a site. Dark diversity is related to "habitat-specific" or "filtered" species pool which only includes species that can both disperse to and potentially inhabit the study site. For example, if fish diversit ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Species
A species () is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. Other ways of defining species include their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology (biology), morphology, behaviour, or ecological niche. In addition, palaeontologists use the concept of the chronospecies since fossil reproduction cannot be examined. The most recent rigorous estimate for the total number of species of eukaryotes is between 8 and 8.7 million. About 14% of these had been described by 2011. All species (except viruses) are given a binomial nomenclature, two-part name, a "binomen". The first part of a binomen is the name of a genus to which the species belongs. The second part is called the specific name (zoology), specific name or the specific ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Gamma Diversity
In ecology, gamma diversity (γ-diversity) is the total species diversity in a landscape. The term was introduced by R. H. WhittakerWhittaker, R. H. (1960) Vegetation of the Siskiyou Mountains, Oregon and California. Ecological Monographs, 30, 279–338. together with the terms alpha diversity (α-diversity) and beta diversity (β-diversity). Whittaker's idea was that the total species diversity in a landscape (γ) is determined by two different things, the mean species diversity in sites at a more local scale (α) and the differentiation among those sites (β). According to this reasoning, alpha diversity and beta diversity constitute independent components of gamma diversity: γ = α × β : Scale considerations The area or landscape of interest may be of very different sizes in different situations, and no consensus has been reached on what spatial scales are appropriate to quantify gamma diversity. It has therefore been proposed that the definition of gamma diversity does ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ecology
Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history. Ecology is a branch of biology, and is the study of abundance (ecology), abundance, biomass (ecology), biomass, and distribution of organisms in the context of the environment. It encompasses life processes, interactions, and adaptations; movement of materials and energy through living communities; ecological succession, successional development of ecosystems; cooperation, competition, and predation within and between species; and patterns of biodiversity and its effect on ecosystem processes. Ecology has practical applications in fields such as conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource m ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Habitat
In ecology, habitat refers to the array of resources, biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species' habitat can be seen as the physical manifestation of its ecological niche. Thus "habitat" is a species-specific term, fundamentally different from concepts such as Biophysical environment, environment or vegetation assemblages, for which the term "habitat-type" is more appropriate. The physical factors may include (for example): soil, moisture, range of temperature, and Luminous intensity, light intensity. Biotic index, Biotic factors include the availability of food and the presence or absence of Predation, predators. Every species has particular habitat requirements, habitat generalist species are able to thrive in a wide array of environmental conditions while habitat specialist species require a very limited set of factors to survive. The habitat of a species is not necessarily found in a ge ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Footnotes
In publishing, a note is a brief text in which the author comments on the subject and themes of the book and names supporting citations. In the editorial production of books and documents, typographically, a note is usually several lines of text at the bottom of the page, at the end of a chapter, at the end of a volume, or a house-style typographic usage throughout the text. Notes are usually identified with superscript numbers or a symbol.''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'' (1992) p. 709. Footnotes are informational notes located at the foot of the thematically relevant page, whilst endnotes are informational notes published at the end of a chapter, the end of a volume, or the conclusion of a multi-volume book. Unlike footnotes, which require manipulating the page design (text-block and page layouts) to accommodate the additional text, endnotes are advantageous to editorial production because the textual inclusion does not alter the design of the publication. H ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Species Pool
The ecological and biogeographical concept of the species pool describes all species available that could potentially colonize and inhabit a focal habitat area. The concept lays emphasis on the fact that "local communities aren't closed systems, and that the species occupying any local site typically came from somewhere else", however, the species pool concept may suffer from the logical fallacy of composition. Most local communities, however, have just a fraction of its species pool present. It is derived from MacArthur and Wilson's Island Biogeography Theory that examines the factors that affect the species richness of isolated natural communities. It helps to understand the composition and richness of local communities and how they are influenced by biogeographic and evolutionary processes acting at large spatial and temporal scales. The absent portion of species pool—dark diversity—has been used to understand processes influencing local communities. Methods to estimate pot ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Species Diversity
Species diversity is the number of different species that are represented in a given community (a dataset). The effective number of species refers to the number of equally abundant species needed to obtain the same mean proportional species abundance as that observed in the dataset of interest (where all species may not be equally abundant). Meanings of species diversity may include species richness, taxonomic or phylogenetic diversity, and/or species evenness. Species richness is a simple count of species. Taxonomic or phylogenetic diversity is the genetic relationship between different groups of species. Species evenness quantifies how equal the abundances of the species are.Hill, M. O. (1973) Diversity and evenness: a unifying notation and its consequences. Ecology, 54, 427–432Tuomisto, H. (2010) A diversity of beta diversities: straightening up a concept gone awry. Part 1. Defining beta diversity as a function of alpha and gamma diversity. Ecography, 33, 2-22. Tuomisto, H. 2 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Measurement Of Biodiversity
A variety of objective means exist to empirically measure biodiversity. Each measure relates to a particular use of the data, and is likely to be associated with the variety of genes. Biodiversity is commonly measured in terms of taxonomic richness of a geographic area over a time interval. In order to calculate biodiversity, species evenness, species richness, and species diversity are to be obtained first. ''Species evenness'' is the relative number of individuals of each species in a given area. ''Species richness'' is the number of species present in a given area. ''Species diversity'' is the relationship between species evenness and species richness. There are many ways to measure biodiversity within a given ecosystem. However, the two most popular are Shannon-Weaver diversity index, commonly referred to as Shannon diversity index, and the other is Simpsons diversity index. Although many scientists prefer to use Shannon's diversity index simply because it takes into account sp ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Biodiversity
Biodiversity is the variability of life, life on Earth. It can be measured on various levels. There is for example genetic variability, species diversity, ecosystem diversity and Phylogenetics, phylogenetic diversity. Diversity is not distributed evenly on Earth. It is greater in the tropics as a result of the warm climate and high primary productivity in the region near the equator. Tropical forest ecosystems cover less than one-fifth of Earth's terrestrial area and contain about 50% of the world's species. There are latitudinal gradients in species diversity for both marine and terrestrial taxa. Since Abiogenesis, life began on Earth, six major mass extinctions and several minor events have led to large and sudden drops in biodiversity. The Phanerozoic aeon (the last 540 million years) marked a rapid growth in biodiversity via the Cambrian explosion. In this period, the majority of Multicellular organism, multicellular Phylum, phyla first appeared. The next 400 mil ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Co-occurrence Matrix
A co-occurrence matrix or co-occurrence distribution (also referred to as : ''gray-level co-occurrence matrices'' GLCMs) is a matrix (mathematics), matrix that is defined over an Digital image, image to be the distribution of co-occurring pixel values (grayscale values, or colors) at a given offset. It is used as an approach to texture analysis with various applications especially in medical image analysis. Method Given a grey-level image I, co-occurrence matrix computes how often pairs of pixels with a specific value and offset occur in the image. * The offset, (\Delta x, \Delta y), is a position operator that can be applied to any pixel in the image (ignoring edge effects): for instance, (1, 2) could indicate "one down, two right". * An image with p different pixel values will produce a p \times p co-occurrence matrix, for the given offset. * The (i, j)^\text value of the co-occurrence matrix gives the number of times in the image that the i^\text and j^\text pixel values occ ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Indicator Value
Indicator value is a term that is used in the ecology of plants for two different indices. The older usage of the term refers to Ellenberg's indicator values from 1974, which are based on a simple ordinal classification of plants according to the position of their realized ecological niche along an environmental gradient.Ellenberg H. Zeigerwerte der Gefässpflanzen Mitteleuropas / H. Ellenberg // Scripta geobotanica. Göttingen, 1974. – Vol. 9. – 197 p. Since 1997, the term has also been used to refer to Dufrêne & Legendre's indicator value, which is a quantitative index measuring the statistical alliance of a species to any one of the classes in a classification of sites. According to Ellenberg Ellenberg's indicator values were the first model of bioindication proposed and applied to the flora of Central Europe, and they have a long tradition in interpretation and understanding of plant communities and their evolution. The latest edition of Ellenberg's indicator values appl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Environmental Niche Modelling
Species distribution modelling (SDM), also known as environmental (or ecological) niche modelling (ENM), habitat modelling, predictive habitat distribution modelling, and range mapping uses ecological models to predict the distribution of a species across geographic space and time using environmental data. The environmental data are most often climate data (e.g. temperature, precipitation), but can include other variables such as soil type, water depth, and land cover. SDMs are used in several research areas in conservation biology, ecology and evolution. These models can be used to understand how environmental conditions influence the occurrence or abundance of a species, and for predictive purposes ( ecological forecasting). Predictions from an SDM may be of a species’ future distribution under climate change, a species’ past distribution in order to assess evolutionary relationships, or the potential future distribution of an invasive species. Predictions of current and/or f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |