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Biotic stresses have had huge repercussions for humanity; an example of this is the potato blight, an oomycete which caused widespread famine in England, Ireland and Belgium in the 1840s. [6] Another example is grape phylloxera coming from North America in the 19th century, which led to the Great French Wine Blight .
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.
Abiotic stress is a naturally occurring factor that cannot be controlled by humans. One example of two stressors that are complementary to each other is wind and drought. Drought dries out the soil and kills the plants that are growing in the soil. After this occurs, the soil is left barren and dry. Wind can pick up the soil and carry for miles.
Plants can protect themselves from abiotic stress in many different ways, and most include a physical change in the plant’s morphology. Phenotypic plasticity is a plant’s ability to alter and adapt its morphology in response to the external environments to protect themselves against stress. [ 2 ]
Although environmental gradients are comprised gradually changing and predictable patterns of an abiotic factor, there is strong interplay between both biotic-biotic factors as well as biotic-abiotic factors. For example, species abundance usually changes along environmental gradients in a more or less predictable way.
Again, these changes are important in understanding the effects of invasive species in a new habitat. The ability of a new species to change an environments abiotic and biotic factors can make a previously habitable environment for a species uninhabitable. The extinction of this species can further change the biotic factors of an environment.
There are many factors, abiotic and biotic, that can raise or lower a habitat's invasibility, such as stress, disturbance, nutrient levels, climate, and pre-existing native species. Typically invasive species favor areas that are nutrient-rich, have few environmental stresses, and high levels of disturbances.
Ecophysiology (from Greek οἶκος, oikos, "house(hold)"; φύσις, physis, "nature, origin"; and -λογία, -logia), environmental physiology or physiological ecology is a biological discipline that studies the response of an organism's physiology to environmental conditions.