The Importance Of Ecological Community

In a strict way, a community consists of all the organisms that live together in a particular habitat. Community structure concerns all possible ways in which the members of that community relate to and interact with each other. This includes the community-level properties that emerge from these interactions, such as trophic structure, energy flow, species diversity, relative abundance, and community stability [1]. Ecological communities are one of the most complex systems that natural scientists attempt to understand. Ecologists have investigated patterns of species richness, population abundance and community structure in an effort to discern the basic principles of community ecology as they continue to search for a conceptualization of communities [2]. For example, we are interested in the rules by which species are included or excluded from communities. In extension, how will species densities change in relationship to species richness, or as result of a changing environment? How do temporal, spatial and trophical heterogeneity, as well as biodiversity, shape communities? Identifying these patterns and

Instead, research is often focused on a convenient and tractable subset (usually a taxonomic subset) of a particular community or a series of communities. One of the most basic descriptions of an ecological community is a species abundance distribution (SAD), which describes the abundance (number of individuals observed) for each different species encountered. When plotted as a histogram, the hyperbolic shape of the SAD seems to be universal, as communities consistently contain very few abundant species and many rare species [5]. Studies on communities of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have already improved our knowledge of the relationship between biotic and abiotic factors and of how species coexist in communities