Population Distribution and Abundance

Vocabulary flashcards covering key concepts of population distribution, ecological niches, spatial patterns, and species case studies from Chapter 9.

Population

A group of individuals of a single species inhabiting a specific area.

Distribution

The size, shape, and location of the area that a population occupies.

Ecological Niche

The environmental factors—including physical, biotic, and abiotic components—that impact the growth, survival, and reproduction of a species.

Hutchinson's Niche

A concept that defines a niche as an $n$-dimensional hypervolume, where $n$ represents the number of environmental factors essential for an organism's survival and reproduction.

Fundamental Niche

The hypervolume of physical conditions under which an organism can live without the constraining effects of interactions with other organisms.

Realized Niche

The restricted physical conditions and actual environment in which an organism lives as a result of interactions with other species.

Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM)

A method used to recreate relationships between species and their environment to identify unexplored geographic areas where species may occur and predict potential habitat.

Brycon henni

An endemic fish species of the Colombian Andes whose niche was modeled along the Magdalena Basin to predict geographical distribution.

Encelia farinosa

A desert plant species with high leaf pubescence that reduces light absorbance to prevent overheating in hot, dry environments.

Encelia frutescens

A desert plant species with low leaf pubescence that avoids overheating through high transpiration rates and evaporative cooling.

Clumped Distribution

A spatial distribution pattern where individuals aggregate in specific patches due to resource concentration, protection, or social structure.

Uniform Distribution

A spatial distribution pattern where individuals are evenly spaced across an area due to negative interactions such as competition, territoriality, or allelopathy.

Random Distribution

A spatial distribution pattern where individual positions are independent of others, occurring when environmental conditions are uniform and interactions are neutral.

Trigona fulviventris

An aggressive stingless bee species whose colonies show a regular (uniform) distribution across forest tracts due to territorial battles over nest trees.

Trigona dorsalis

A less-interactive, non-aggressive stingless bee species whose colonies show a random distribution pattern across the same forest tracts.

Larrea tridentata

The creosote bush, a desert shrub whose spatial distribution shifts temporally from clumped (young shrubs) to random (medium shrubs) to regular (large shrubs) as competition for water intensifies.