Published in Encyclopedia of Biodiversity
The life of birds is based on flight, which has both constrained their diversification and opened ecological opportunities. It affects their size and their abundance. Their ecology is based on the exploitation of patchy and variable resources, migration being the most obvious manifestation of this. A few birds are flightless. The taxonomic diversit...
Published in Encyclopedia of Biodiversity
It is a familiar experience that taxonomic diversity increases as more area is examined, as more time is spent watching an area, as more organisms are collected, and as a wider range of body sizes are accumulated. These increases in diversity do not scale directly with area, time, collection size, or body size. More than 50 years ago, C. B. William...
Published in Encyclopedia of Biodiversity
The terrestrial invertebrates contain the majority of the world's animal species, although marine environments harbor more phyla representing more widely separate animal groups. Only comparatively few of the phyla have managed to adapt to terrestrial conditions, that is drought, ultraviolet radiation, no support of water against gravity, as well as...
