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An environmental factor, ecological factor or eco factor is any factor, abiotic or biotic, that influences living organisms. [1] Abiotic factors include ambient temperature, amount of sunlight, air, soil, water and pH of the water soil in which an organism lives.
Abiotic stress is the negative impact of non-living factors on the living organisms in a specific environment. [1] The non-living variable must influence the environment beyond its normal range of variation to adversely affect the population performance or individual physiology of the organism in a significant way.
Humans can make or change abiotic factors in a species' environment. For instance, fertilizers can affect a snail's habitat, or the greenhouse gases which humans utilize can change marine pH levels. Abiotic components include physical conditions and non-living resources that affect living organisms in terms of growth, maintenance, and ...
Ecosystem processes are the net effect of the actions of individual organisms as they interact with their environment. Ecological theory suggests that in order to coexist, species must have some level of limiting similarity —they must be different from one another in some fundamental way, otherwise, one species would competitively exclude the ...
Ecohealth is the relationship of human health to the environment, including the effect of climate change, wars, food production, urbanization, and ecosystem structure and function. [76] Ecosystem management and ecosystem-based management refer to the sustainable management of ecosystems and in some cases may employ the terms ecosystem health or ...
Such priority effects could have dramatic impacts on community composition and food web structure. Even intra-guild priority effects could have important consequences at multiple trophic levels if the affected species are associated with unique predator or prey species. Consider, for example, a plant species that is eaten by a host-specific ...
Ecosystem services are ecologically mediated functional processes essential to sustaining healthy human societies. [6] Water provision and filtration, production of biomass in forestry, agriculture, and fisheries, and removal of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO 2) from the atmosphere are examples of ecosystem services essential to public health and economic opportunity.
All species have limits of tolerance to abiotic factors. Too much or too little of anything can lower their survival and reproductive success and cause reduced fitness . Changes in temperature resulting from global warming , for example, may cause a species to change its geographical distribution northward.