Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Limiting factors may be physical or biological. [4]: 417, 8 Limiting factors are not limited to the condition of the species. Some factors may be increased or reduced based on circumstances. An example of a limiting factor is sunlight in the rain forest, where growth is limited to all plants on the forest floor unless more light becomes ...
Liebig's law states that growth only occurs at the rate permitted by the most limiting factor. [ 2 ] For instance, in the equation below, the growth of population O {\displaystyle O} is a function of the minimum of three Michaelis-Menten terms representing limitation by factors I {\displaystyle I} , N {\displaystyle N} and P {\displaystyle P} .
A low level of one factor can sometimes be partially compensated for by appropriate levels of other factors. In case of chemical reactions it is known as law of limiting factor. A corollary to this is that two factors may work synergistically (e.g. 1 + 1 = 5), to make a habitat favorable or unfavorable. Geographic distribution of sugar maple.
In most cases combinations of factors are responsible for limiting the geographic range edge of species. Abiotic and biotic factors may work together in determining the range of a species. An example might be some obligate seeder plants where the distribution is limited by the presence of wildfires, which are needed to allow their seed bank to ...
[1] [2] It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for example, by growing when resources are abundant, and when predators, parasites and pathogens are scarce) and how it in turn alters those same factors (for example, limiting access to resources by other organisms, acting as a food ...
Biological constraints are factors which make populations resistant to evolutionary change. One proposed definition of constraint is "A property of a trait that, although possibly adaptive in the environment in which it originally evolved, acts to place limits on the production of new phenotypic variants."
Realized niche width is a phrase relating to ecology, is defined by the actual space that an organism inhabits and the resources it can access as a result of limiting pressures from other species (e.g. superior competitors).
The best-known example is the so-called "paradox of the plankton". [6] All plankton species live on a very limited number of resources, primarily solar energy and minerals dissolved in the water. According to the competitive exclusion principle, only a small number of plankton species should be able to coexist on these resources.