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Menge & Sutherland formulated a new model, one that incorporated Connell's ideas in a two part graph published in The American Naturalist (1987). [12] This model proposes that predation, competition, and disturbance are all responsible for shaping the diversity of a community under certain circumstances.
Raccoons (Procyon lotor) and skunks (Mephitis mephitis) are mesopredators.Here they share cat food in a suburban backyard.. The mesopredator release hypothesis is an ecological theory used to describe the interrelated population dynamics between apex predators and mesopredators within an ecosystem, such that a collapsing population of the former results in dramatically increased populations of ...
A structural diagram of the open ocean plankton ecosystem model of Fasham, Ducklow & McKelvie (1990). [1]An ecosystem model is an abstract, usually mathematical, representation of an ecological system (ranging in scale from an individual population, to an ecological community, or even an entire biome), which is studied to better understand the real system.
Trophic cascades are powerful indirect interactions that can control entire ecosystems, occurring when a trophic level in a food web is suppressed. For example, a top-down cascade will occur if predators are effective enough in predation to reduce the abundance, or alter the behavior of their prey, thereby releasing the next lower trophic level from predation (or herbivory if the intermediate ...
Peter Brussard and colleagues emphasize that ecosystem management balances preserving ecosystem health while sustaining human needs. [11] As a concept of natural resource management, ecosystem management remains both ambiguous and controversial, in part because some of its formulations rest on contested policy and scientific assertions. [12]
The Lotka–Volterra system of equations is an example of a Kolmogorov population model (not to be confused with the better known Kolmogorov equations), [2] [3] [4] which is a more general framework that can model the dynamics of ecological systems with predator–prey interactions, competition, disease, and mutualism.
Predation is a short-term interaction, in which the predator, here an osprey, kills and eats its prey. Short-term interactions, including predation and pollination, are extremely important in ecology and evolution. These are short-lived in terms of the duration of a single interaction: a predator kills and eats a prey; a pollinator transfers ...
Ecosystem management and ecosystem-based management refer to the sustainable management of ecosystems and in some cases may employ the terms ecosystem health or ecosystem integrity as a goal. [77] The practice of natural resource management has evolved as societal priorities have changed and, as a consequence, the working definition of ...