Community Ecology

Community ecology helps scientists to understand how the communities are built up and also helps them understand how the changes over time will affect all the species. As a huge number of species connect and interact with each other, they tend to form a biological community. It is a community that consists of interactions of a huge number of species who are living in the same geological location. The study of community ecology helps to understand relationships between community members and the environment itself.  Community Ecology can be subdivided accordingly by its habitat and biome.  Typically it includes forest, desert grasslands, etc. 

Community Ecology Example

Trophic Pyramid

Every biological community ecosystem has an almost structural behavior called the trophic pyramid. Every pyramid consists of at least four to five levels, where food energy tends to transform from one to another along a food chain. The energy on every level is losing its heat, therefore it takes a lot of organisms to support the next level up.  The pyramid consists of two types of species. One of them is called autotrophs and consists of an organism that allows them to harvest sunlight which is known as photosynthesis. Autotrophs are meant to be at the very bottom of the pyramid, while the other group species are called heterotrophs and they are meant to be at the top of the pyramid just because of their organism. 

Ecological Succession 

Ecological succession is the process of species and habitat changes and builds their relationships over time. Eventually, these types of communities try to replace each other until they reach the climax, which is called the ‘climax community.’  A great example of a climax community is – a matured forest.  Ecological succession contains all the fundamentals of population and community ecology. Each community of plants creates such conditions that allow many other plants to thrive. As an example, the grass is an early colonizer that might add nutrients and other important elements to the soil, but who comes, later on, provides other elements like shadows and covers are generally contributed by the big trees. Eventually, a climax community arises and stops the succession temporarily till a disturbance comes and forces the community to restart ecological succession.

Guilds

According to the activities of species, their locations and attributes can be defined. Members of the guild can be found competing for the same resources or can even be found cooperating in different situations. Guild in ecology defines a group of species who can exploit the same resource in many ways. As a result of shared ancestry, species from common ancestors tend to exploit the same resource in a very similar way. However, guilds may consist of different types of species. 

Interactive Relations between Species 

A community ecosystem consists of many varieties of interactions happening between two or more numbers of species. These interactions may lead to positive results, sometimes negative results, sometimes cooperative, or may even not affect species at all. There are five different types of interactions that can be expected in a community ecosystem –

• Competition –A biological community ecosystem that includes plants and animals has a tendency of competing over resources, such as – food and territories.
• Predation and herbivory – In a community when one species hunts another for their nutritional needs, it’s predation. As an example – a tiger in a forest will find its prey to fulfill its nutritional needs.
• Commensalism – This is a kind of relationship where one gets benefited by another species while the other is unaffected. 
• Mutualism – This is a type of relationship in the community ecosystem that defines a mutual benefit for both the participants. 
• Parasitism – One of the most common ways of life is parasitism. One species gets the benefit from other species by making them a host to fulfill their need. The host species can be affected by the parasite species’ activities. 

Conclusion

In a community, there can be different types of species living together and interacting with each other over time and changing their nature accordingly to survive in the ecosystem. In a community ecosystem, there is a huge range of species from different ancestries there can be different nutritional needs, so species around the community interacting with each other can positively affect the other, negatively, or may not even affect sometimes. However community ecosystems are always changing over time but, interestingly there can even be a ‘climax community ecosystem’ which does not change until forced by something, as an example, a forest is by nature a “climax community ecosystem’ and a forest will only change its community ecosystem when it is forced to do, such as fire or earthquake or maybe thunder.