co - operation is the relationship between species that are adapted to each other.
what are relationships between species that are adapted to each other?
co - operation
disturbances act to disrupt stable ecosystems and clear species' habitat. as a result, disturbances lead to species movement into the newly cleared area. once an area is cleared there is a progressive increase in species richness and competition takes place again. once disturbance is removed, species richness decreases as competitive exclusion increases. "gause's law", also known as competitive exclusion, explains how species that compete for the same resources cannot coexist in the same niche. each species handles change from a disturbance differently; therefore, idh can be described as both "broad in description and rich in detail". the broad idh model can be broken down into smaller divisions which include spatial within-patch scales, spatial between-patch scales, and purely temporal models. each subdivision within this theory generates similar explanations for the coexistence of species with habitat disturbance. joseph h. connell proposed that relatively low disturbance leads to decreased diversity and high disturbance causes an increase in species movement. these proposed relationships lead to the hypothesis that intermediate disturbance levels would be the optimal amount of disorder within an ecosystem. once k-selected and r-selected species can live in the same region, species richness can reach its maximum. the main difference between both types of species is their growth and reproduction rate. these characteristics attribute to the species that thrive in habitats with higher and lower amounts of disturbance. k-selected species generally demonstrate more competitive traits. their primary investment of resources is directed towards growth, causing them to dominate stable ecosystems over a long period of time; an example of k-selected species the african elephant, which is prone to extinction because of their long generation times and low reproductive rates. in contrast, r-selected species colonize open areas quickly and can dominate landscapes that have been recently cleared by disturbance. an ideal examples of r-selected groups are algae. based on the contradictory characteristics of both of these examples, areas of occasional disturbance allow both r and k species to benefit by residing in the same area. the ecological effect on species relationships is therefore supported by the intermediate disturbance hypothesis.
intermediate disturbance hypothesis
authors have classified the species–area relationship according to the type of habitats being sampled and the census design used. frank w. preston, an early investigator of the theory of the species–area relationship, divided it into two types: samples (a census of a contiguous habitat that grows in census area, also called "mainland" species–area relationships), and isolates (a census of discontiguous habitats, such as islands, also called "island" species–area relationships). michael rosenzweig also notes that species–area relationships for very large areas—those collecting different biogeographic provinces or continents—behave differently from species–area relationships from islands or smaller contiguous areas. it has been presumed that "island"-like species–area relationships have higher slopes (in log–log space) than "mainland" relationships, but a 2006 metaanalysis of almost 700 species–area relationships found the former had lower slopes than the latter.
species–area relationship