Exam 16: Community Structure

In a food web, the average number of feeding links per species, or linkage ________, provides one measure of community complexity.

The research of Sally Hacker has demonstrated that Juncus plants are strong antagonists, causing increases in conditions such as salinity that hinder the growth of other plants such as Iva.

Explain what an indirect interaction is, and give an example of an indirect interaction that has a strong effect on a specific species in a community.

In a food web diagram, top ________ are species that prey on intermediate and basal species but are not fed upon themselves.

The boundaries between communities are usually sharply defined and easily discerned.

It is usually straightforward to determine the species richness of any given community since species richness is simply the number of species in a community.

Plant community structure along an environmental gradient can often be explained by

Species interactions within a community rarely involve only two species.

The diversity of an animal community is unrelated to the physical structure of a plant community.

When prey populations are controlled by predators in a trophic level above them they are said to be under ________ control.

Changes in the physical and biological structure of communities as you move across the landscape are referred to as ________.

Competitive interactions are often diffuse while mutualisms are not.

In a forest community, the layer containing tall shrubs, small trees, and young trees is called the ________.

A community refers to the group of species that occupy a given area, interacting either directly or indirectly.

Environmental conditions often vary spatially but do not tend to change over time in a given place.

A(n)________ model of community structure assumes that interactions among species have no impact on community structure.

A group of species in a community that all exploit the same common resource is called a

The removal of a single species from a community can have unpredictable consequences.

The benthic zone of a lake is where most of the decomposition takes place.

Variation in environmental conditions within a community, or environmental ________, can have a strong influence on the diversity of a community.