The research will fall under the ecosystem ecology paradigm and focus on an analysis of how these three aspects interplay. A saga in this study will be my hypothesis: ecological dynamics of resource availability, competition, and adaptation. In analyzing the influence of soil moisture on vegetation distribution, I am indirectly testing for how the plants competed for the same limited resource and adjusted to different environmental conditions. This, in turn, has strong implications for our understanding of how ecosystems work, for biodiversity, and for their resilience. For instance, such a change in the pattern of soil moisture will alter the plant community composition, cascading down to the ecosystem function level, such as nutrient cycling, decomposition, and carbon sequestration.
The concepts underlying this research are ecologically based niche theory, resource availability restraint, and the process of environmental filtering. This work traces developments in ecology from the inputs of ecologists such as Grime, who emphasized the role of resource availability in driving plant community composition, and Tilman, who worked on the role of competition in explaining species coexistence. It contributes to making our understanding of the complex interactions of ecosystem dynamics better by studying links between soil moisture, vegetation types, and environmental variables.
Three keywords be encapsulating my research project are:
Leaf Length
Soil Moisture Gradients
vegetation ecology
Environmental filtering.