ECOLOGY

by Purwaning Rohmah/BIO off A 2015 UM

COMMUNITY STRUCTURE

The community structure may different with other habitats, altough the habitats are located in the same ecosystem. The different community structure is caused by various spesific environmental condition (temperature, humidity, air pressure, soil structure, etc) and resources (light, food, etc) each organism has to grow and reproduce well. These factors of typical environment then affect number of species diversity, species richness, and species evennes which is described the illustration of community structure (Comunity structure is consist of species diversity, species richness, and species evennes).

Key points:

1.       A community's structure can be described by its species richness, which is the number of species present, and species diversity, which is a measure of both species richness and species evenness (relative numbers).

·         Species Richness: Number of species

·         Species Evenness: Describes how equally distributed individuals in the community are across species

·         Species Diversity: An index composed of richness and evenness

2.       Community structure is influenced by many factors, including abiotic factors, species interactions, level of disturbance, and chance events.

3.       Some species, such as foundation species and keystone species, play particularly important roles in determining their communities' structure.

Different ecological communities can be pretty different in terms of the types and numbers of species they contain. For instance, some Arctic communities include just a few species, while some tropical rainforest communities have huge numbers of species packed into each cubic meter.

One way to describe this difference is to say that the communities have different structures. Community structure is essentially the composition of a community, including the number of species in that community and their relative numbers. It can also be interpreted more broadly, to include all of the patterns of interaction between these different species. Then, we'll examine factors that shape community structure, focusing especially on foundation and keystone species.