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In ecology, functional equivalence (or functional redundancy) is the ecological phenomenon that multiple species representing a variety of taxonomic groups can share similar, if not identical, roles in ecosystem functionality (e.g., nitrogen fixers, algae scrapers, scavengers). [1] This phenomenon can apply to both plant and animal taxa.
Debates over the validity of the IDH are ongoing within the discipline of tropical ecology as the theory is tested in various ecological communities. Other evidence exists for [15] [16] and against [17] [18] the hypothesis. The intermediate disturbance hypothesis has been supported by several studies involving marine habitats such as coral ...
Ecosystems can shift from one state to another via a significant perturbation directly to state variables.State variables are quantities that change quickly (in ecologically-relevant time scales) in response to feedbacks from the system (i.e., they are dependent on system feedbacks), such as population densities.
Population ecology is a sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment. [15] It is the study of how the population sizes of species living together in groups change over time and space, and was one of the first aspects of ecology to be studied and modelled mathematically.
Functional redundancy refers to the phenomenon that species in the same ecosystem fill similar roles, which results in a sort of "insurance" in the ecosystem. Redundant species can easily do the job of a similar species from the same functional niche. [13] This is possible because similar species have adapted to fill the same niche overtime.
It is possible for an ecosystem or a community to be stable in some of their properties and unstable in others. For example, a vegetation community in response to a drought might conserve biomass but lose biodiversity. [3] Stable ecological systems abound in nature, and the scientific literature has documented them to a great extent.
Although not strictly necessary for a neutral theory, many stochastic models of biodiversity assume a fixed, finite community size (total number of individual organisms). ). There are unavoidable physical constraints on the total number of individuals that can be packed into a given space (although space per se isn't necessarily a resource, it is often a useful surrogate variable for a ...
The balance of nature, also known as ecological balance, is a theory that proposes that ecological systems are usually in a stable equilibrium or homeostasis, which is to say that a small change (the size of a particular population, for example) will be corrected by some negative feedback that will bring the parameter back to its original "point of balance" with the rest of the system.