A bioindicator is a type of living thing, such as a specific animal or group of animals, that can show how healthy or unhealthy an environment is. These living things can reveal changes in their environment through their behavior, numbers, or how they are affected. Many bioindicators are animals, like small water creatures called copepods and other crustaceans found in lakes, rivers, and oceans.
Umbrella species are animals or plants chosen to guide conservation efforts because protecting them helps preserve many other species in their habitat. This is called the umbrella effect. Conservation can be difficult because it is hard to know the exact condition of many species.
A wildlife corridor, also called a habitat corridor or green corridor, is an area that links groups of animals that have been separated by human activities such as industrialization, farming, city growth, roads, land clearing, and other developments. These corridors help reduce the effects of habitat fragmentation, which occurs when natural areas are divided into smaller parts, limiting animal movement. This fragmentation is often caused by fast-growing cities and transportation networks.
Population fragmentation is a type of population segregation. It happens when habitats are broken into smaller pieces, causing a population to split into smaller, separate groups. This separation can lead to changes in genetic traits and increased mating among closely related individuals within these groups.
Spatial ecology studies the areas where species live. In a habitat shared by multiple species, each species usually lives in its own specific area or niche. This is because two species can’t usually share the same niche for a long time.
In ecology, edge effects refer to changes in the number of animals or plants and how they group together at the edges where two or more habitats meet. These changes happen because the environment near the edges is different from the environment inside the habitats. Edges of habitats often have more wind, more sunlight, and bigger changes in temperature compared to the inside.
Patch dynamics is a way to study ecosystems by looking at how different areas, called patches, interact with each other. These patches can be studied to understand how ecosystems work, change over time, and how their parts fit together. Patch dynamics refers to how these patches change in size, shape, and other features over time and across a landscape.
Insular biogeography, also called island biogeography, is a branch of biogeography that studies what causes different numbers of species and how species change over time in areas that are separated from other areas. This theory was first created to explain how the number of species relates to the size of islands in the ocean. Today, the term is used to describe any area, whether it exists now or in the past, that is separated by different types of environments.
Minimum viable population (MVP) is the smallest number of individuals in a species needed to survive in the wild. This term is used in the fields of biology, ecology, and conservation biology. MVP refers to the smallest number of individuals needed for a population to survive without going extinct due to natural disasters or random events related to population numbers, environment, or genes.
Population viability analysis (PVA) is a method used in conservation biology to assess risks for specific species. It is traditionally described as the process of calculating the chance that a population might disappear within a certain number of years. More recently, PVA has been explained as a way to combine ecology and statistics, using details about a species and changes in its environment to predict how healthy a population will be and the risk of extinction.