Limiting factor  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Redirected from Limiting resource)
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

A limiting factor or limiting resource is a factor that controls a process, such as organism growth or species population, size, or distribution. The availability of food, predation pressure, or availability of shelter are examples of factors that could be limiting for an organism. An example of a limiting factor is sunlight in the rainforest, where growth is limited to all plants in the understory unless more light becomes available.

A number of potential factors could influence a biological process, but importantly only one is limiting at any one place and time. This recognition that there is always a single limiting factor is vital in ecology; and the concept has parallels in numerous other processes.

Some other limiting factors in biology are water availability, temperature, shelter, or predation, .

References

  • Raghothama, K. G. & Karthikeyan, A.S. (2005) Phosphate acquisition. Plant and Soil, 274 37-49.
  • Taylor, W. A. (1934). Significance of extreme or intermittent conditions in distribution of species and management of natural resources, with a restatement of Liebig's law of the minimum. Ecology, 15: 374-379.
  • Shelford, V. E. (1952). Paired factors and master factors in environmental relations. Illinois Acad. Sci. Trans., 45: 155-160
  • Sundareshwar P.V., J.T. Morris, E.K. Koepfler, and B. Fornwalt. (2003). Phosphorus limitation of coastal ecosystem processes. Science 299:563-565.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Limiting factor" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools