HOME





Species Accumulation Curve
In ecology, the species discovery curve (also known as a species accumulation curve or collector's curve) is a graph recording the cumulative number of species of living things recorded in a particular environment as a function of the cumulative effort expended searching for them (usually measured in person-hours). It is related to, but not identical with, the species-area curve. The species discovery curve will necessarily be increasing, and will normally be negatively accelerated (that is, its rate of increase will slow down). Plotting the curve gives a way of estimating the number of additional species that will be discovered with further effort. This is usually done by fitting some kind of functional form to the curve, either by eye or by using non-linear regression techniques. Commonly used functional forms include the logarithmic function and the negative exponential function. The advantage of the negative exponential function is that it tends to an asymptote which equal ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

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]  


Anne Chao
Lien-Ju Anne Chao (; born 1950) is a Taiwanese environmental statistician. She works in the Institute of Statistics at National Tsing Hua University, where she is Tsing Hua Distinguished Chair Professor and a former Taiwan National Chair Professor. Chao has described herself as "60% statistician, 30% mathematician and 10% ecologist". She is known for her work on mark and recapture methods for estimating the size and diversity of populations. The Chao1 and Chao2 estimators of species richness are named after her. Education and career Chao earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics at National Tsing Hua University in 1973. She moved to the United States for graduate studies, completing a PhD in statistics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977. Her dissertation, supervised by Bernard Harris, was ''The Quadrature Method in Inference Problems Arising From the Generalized Multinomial Distribution''. After working for a year as a visiting assistant professor at the Unive ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Vocabulary
A vocabulary (also known as a lexicon) is a set of words, typically the set in a language or the set known to an individual. The word ''vocabulary'' originated from the Latin , meaning "a word, name". It forms an essential component of language and communication, helping convey thoughts, ideas, emotions, and information. Vocabulary can be oral, written, or signed and can be categorized into two main types: active vocabulary (words one uses regularly) and passive vocabulary (words one recognizes but does not use often). An individual's vocabulary continually evolves through various methods, including direct instruction, independent reading, and natural language exposure, but it can also shrink due to forgetting, trauma, or disease. Furthermore, vocabulary is a significant focus of study across various disciplines, like linguistics, education, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Vocabulary is not limited to single words; it also encompasses multi-word units known as c ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Gene
In biology, the word gene has two meanings. The Mendelian gene is a basic unit of heredity. The molecular gene is a sequence of nucleotides in DNA that is transcribed to produce a functional RNA. There are two types of molecular genes: protein-coding genes and non-coding genes. During gene expression (the synthesis of Gene product, RNA or protein from a gene), DNA is first transcription (biology), copied into RNA. RNA can be non-coding RNA, directly functional or be the intermediate protein biosynthesis, template for the synthesis of a protein. The transmission of genes to an organism's offspring, is the basis of the inheritance of phenotypic traits from one generation to the next. These genes make up different DNA sequences, together called a genotype, that is specific to every given individual, within the gene pool of the population (biology), population of a given species. The genotype, along with environmental and developmental factors, ultimately determines the phenotype ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Molecular Genetics
Molecular genetics is a branch of biology that addresses how differences in the structures or expression of DNA molecules manifests as variation among organisms. Molecular genetics often applies an "investigative approach" to determine the structure and/or function of genes in an organism's genome using genetic screens.  The field of study is based on the merging of several sub-fields in biology: classical Mendelian inheritance, cellular biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and biotechnology. It integrates these disciplines to explore things like genetic inheritance, gene regulation and expression, and the molecular mechanism behind various life processes. A key goal of molecular genetics is to identify and study genetic mutations. Researchers search for mutations in a gene or induce mutations in a gene to link a gene sequence to a specific phenotype. Therefore molecular genetics is a powerful methodology for linking mutations to genetic conditions that may aid th ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Fixed Action Pattern
"Fixed action pattern" is an Ethology, ethological term describing an instinctive behavioral sequence that is highly stereotyped and species-characteristic. Fixed action patterns are said to be produced by the innate releasing mechanism, a "hard-wired" neural network, in response to a Fixed action pattern#Sign stimulus, sign/key stimulus or releaser. Once released, a fixed action pattern runs to completion. This term is often associated with Konrad Lorenz, who is the founder of the concept. Lorenz identified six characteristics of fixed action patterns. These characteristics state that fixed action patterns are stereotyped, complex, species-characteristic, released, triggered, and independent of experience. Fixed action patterns have been observed in many species, but most notably in fish and birds. Classic studies by Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, Niko Tinbergen involve male stickleback mating behavior and greylag goose egg-retrieval behavior. Fixed action patterns have be ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ethology
Ethology is a branch of zoology that studies the behavior, behaviour of non-human animals. It has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin and of American and German ornithology, ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles Otis Whitman, Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth, and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, the three winners of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Etymology The modern term ''ethology'' derives from the Greek language: wikt:ἦθος, ἦθος, ''ethos'' meaning "character" and , ''wikt:-logia, -logia'' meaning "the study of". The term was first popularized by the American entomologist William Mo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Zipf's Law
Zipf's law (; ) is an empirical law stating that when a list of measured values is sorted in decreasing order, the value of the -th entry is often approximately inversely proportional to . The best known instance of Zipf's law applies to the frequency table of words in a text or corpus of natural language: \ \mathsf\ \propto\ \frac ~. It is usually found that the most common word occurs approximately twice as often as the next common one, three times as often as the third most common, and so on. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "''the''" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's law, the second-place word "''of''" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "''and''" (28,852). It is often used in the following form, called Zipf-Mandelbrot law: \ \mathsf\ \propto\ \frac\ where \ a\ a ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


British Malaya
The term "British Malaya" (; ) loosely describes a set of states on the Malay Peninsula and the island of Singapore that were brought under British Empire, British hegemony or control between the late 18th and the mid-20th century. Unlike the term "British Raj, British India", which excludes the Indian princely states, British Malaya is often used to refer to the Federated Malay States, Federated and the Unfederated Malay States, which were British protectorates with their own local rulers, as well as the Straits Settlements, which were under the sovereignty and direct rule of the British Crown, after a period of control by the East India Company. Before the formation of the Malayan Union in 1946, the territories were not placed under a single unified administration, with the exception of the immediate post-war period when a British military officer became the temporary administrator of Malaya. Instead, British Malaya comprised the Straits Settlements, the Federated Malay State ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

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]  


picture info

Butterfly
Butterflies are winged insects from the lepidopteran superfamily Papilionoidea, characterized by large, often brightly coloured wings that often fold together when at rest, and a conspicuous, fluttering flight. The oldest butterfly fossils have been dated to the Paleocene, about 56 million years ago, though molecular evidence suggests that they likely originated in the Cretaceous. Butterflies have a four-stage life cycle, and like other holometabolous insects they undergo complete metamorphosis. Winged adults lay eggs on the food plant on which their larvae, known as caterpillars, will feed. The caterpillars grow, sometimes very rapidly, and when fully developed, pupate in a chrysalis. When metamorphosis is complete, the pupal skin splits, the adult insect climbs out, expands its wings to dry, and flies off. Some butterflies, especially in the tropics, have several generations in a year, while others have a single generation, and a few in cold locations may take s ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Asymptote
In analytic geometry, an asymptote () of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as one or both of the ''x'' or ''y'' coordinates tends to infinity. In projective geometry and related contexts, an asymptote of a curve is a line which is tangent to the curve at a point at infinity. The word asymptote is derived from the Greek ἀσύμπτωτος (''asumptōtos'') which means "not falling together", from ἀ priv. + σύν "together" + πτωτ-ός "fallen". The term was introduced by Apollonius of Perga in his work on conic sections, but in contrast to its modern meaning, he used it to mean any line that does not intersect the given curve. There are three kinds of asymptotes: ''horizontal'', ''vertical'' and ''oblique''. For curves given by the graph of a function , horizontal asymptotes are horizontal lines that the graph of the function approaches as ''x'' tends to Vertical asymptotes are vertical lines near which the ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]