Ecology

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7 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Ecology.

• Belt transect — An ecological sampling design that counts organisms or cover within a strip made from contiguous or spaced quadrats along a line, revealing abundance change across a gradient.
• Detritus — The heterogeneous nonliving organic-matter pool through which dead biomass, litter, feces, and fragmented remains are conditioned, consumed, transported, and remineralized in ecological food webs and element cycles.
• Ecological stoichiometry — Explain organism–resource interactions and ecosystem fluxes through mass-balanced mismatches among energy and elemental ratios, especially carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.
• Gamma diversity — Measure the total diversity represented across a declared regional or pooled assemblage scale, with the diversity measure and alpha–beta partition convention kept explicit.
• Numerical response — The change in predator population density produced by changing prey density through demographic and aggregational responses.
• Photoautotroph — An organism that uses light as its energy source and inorganic carbon as the principal carbon source for synthesizing organic matter.
• Scavenger — An animal occupies the scavenger role when it obtains some of its nutrition by finding and consuming carrion whose death its feeding group did not cause, creating a non-predatory energy-transfer link from carcass biomass into a consumer and its food web.