Discover

'Ecophysiology' or 'environmental physiology' is a biological discipline which studies the adaptation of organism's physiology to environmental conditions. It is closely related to comparative physiology and evolutionary physiology.

Contents

Ecophysiology of plants

Ecophysiology of animals

Further reading

See also

References

Ecophysiology of plants

Plant ecophysiology is concerned largely with two topics: mechanisms (how plants sense and respond to environmental change) and scaling or integration (how the responses to highly variable conditions -- for example, gradients from full sunlight to 95% shade within tree canopies -- are coordinated with one another, and how their collective effect on plant growth and gas exchange can be understood on this basis.
In many cases, animals are able to escape unfavourable and changing environmental factors such as heat, cold, drought, or floods, while generally plants are unable to move away and therefor must endure the adverse conditions or perish. Some plants have an impressive array of genes which aid in adapting to changing conditions. It is hypothesized that this large number of genes can be partly explained by plant species' need to adapt to a wider range of conditions.

Ecophysiology of animals

George A. Bartholomew (1919-2006) was a founder of animal physiological ecology. He served on the faculty at UCLA from 1947 to 1989, and almost 1,200 individuals can trace their academic lineages to him BartGen Tree. Knut Schmidt-Nielsen (1915-2007) was also an important contributor to this specific scientific field as well as comparative physiology.

Further reading

★ The academic genealogy of George A. Bartholomew, , A. F., Bennett, Integrative and Comparative Biology, 2005

★ Vertebrate ecophysiology: an introduction to its principles and applications, , Sidney Donald, Bradshaw, Cambridge University Press, 2003,

★ Evolutionary physiological ecology, , P., Calow, Cambridge University Press, 1987,

★ The physiological ecology of vertebrates: a view from energetics, , B. K., McNab, Comstock Publishing Associates, 2002,

★ Physiological ecology of animals: an evolutionary approach, , R. M., Sibly, Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1986,

★ Spicer, J. I., and K. J. Gaston. 1999. Physiological diversity and its ecological implications. Blackwell Science, Oxford, U.K. x + 241 pp.

★ What is physiological ecology?, , C. R., Tracy, Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America (Bull. Ecol. Soc. Am.), 1982 . Definitions and Opinions by: G. A. Bartholomew, A. F. Bennett, W. D. Billings, B. F. Chabot, D. M. Gates, B. Heinrich, R. B. Huey, D. H. Janzen, J. R. King, P. A. McClure, B. K. McNab, P. C. Miller, P. S. Nobel, B. R. Strain.

See also

★ Comparative physiology

★ Evolutionary physiology

★ Ecology

★ Phylogenetic comparative methods

★ Raymond B. Huey

References