Glossary of Ecology - S

S

• savanna - A flat grassland with scattered trees in tropical or subtropical regions
• secondary succession - succession that occurs after the original population has been destroyed or disturbed, as with a forest fire
• selfish behavior - occurs when an individual, despite the impact it may have on the rest of the population, increases its own chances of reproducing
• selfish herd - how individuals in a group can act together without planned direction
• sexual selection - a trait that makes an individual more likely to find a mate than others. A microevolutionary process.
• sign stimulus - Fixed action patterns such as mating dances.
• signal receiver - The individual who is responding to the communication signals sent by the signaler.
• signaler - a way to capture attention from a species
• social parasite - A group or individual that latches on to another group or individual to benefit itself. This type of process affects the original pattern of the group its feeding off.
• social behavior - behavior of an individual towards society and members of the same species as a whole.
• soil - the naturally occurring, unconsolidated or loose covering on the Earth's surface
• soil ecology - the ecology of the pedosphere
• song system - a series of discrete brain nuclei used to produce and learn certain songs of songbirds.
• source-sink dynamics - a theoretical model used by ecologists to describe how variation in habitat quality may affect the population growth or decline of organisms
• southern pine forests - a forest consisting of a pine species that thrives in the sandy, dry, and nutrient-poor soil on the coastal plains of the south Atlantic and Gulf states.
• speciation - the evolutionary process where new biological species come about
• spring overturn - the mixing of lake waters through the melting of ice cover, the warming of surface waters, convection currents, and wind action occurring in spring
• sulfur cycle -
• stream - a flowing-water ecosystem that starts out as freshwater springs or seeps
• survivorship curve - a graph showing the number or proportion of individuals surviving at each age for a given species
• symbiosis - a non-predator prey interaction between individuals of different species.
• synecology
• system
• symbiosis - is a relationship between two or more individuals in a species mainly concerning food. (For example: if the species is competing for the same food, trying to avoid getting eaten or is attempted to eat the other.) There are five different types of symbolic relations that describe who benefits from the relation.