In: Biology
Why might the relationship between Disturbance and Species Composition be MORE IMPORTANT than Species Richness to a Conservation Biologist?
Species richness means the total number of species present in a community. Consider in a community 1 there are around 12 types of species present and in community 2 , 8 type of species are present. These species may belong to different trophic level or few of them to same trophic level . Also some of them share their niche.
Disturbance i.e, an event such as storm, fire, flood ,drought ,overgrazing or human activity that changes a community by removing organisms from it or altering resourc availability.
If there is no disturbance , there will be more competition among organism for common resources . This will result in competitive exclusion of the species.
For a conservationist species richness is not much important because if in a community species richness is more but less disturbance it will give rise to competition finally resulting in extinction of species.
But if in a community , species richness is less but disturbance is more than population of competing species will be checked regularly so less extinction