In this video, we're going to begin our introduction to community ecology. And so first recall from our previous lesson videos that the term community refers to multiple populations of different species living and interacting in the same area. Now community ecology studies not only the interactions between different members of the community but also studies the overall structure of the community. And community structure refers to things such as the diversity, abundance, and overall organization of different species in the community. Now down below in the image, we have a map of the lesson on community ecology, which is essentially a table of contents.
And so we're going to follow this map from top to bottom, but also from left to right. And so in our lesson on community ecology, we're going to start off by talking about community interactions. And there are 4 community interactions, which are competition, exploitation, mutualism, and commensalism. We'll first dive into competition, talking about competitive exclusion, resource partitioning, and character displacement. Then we'll dive into exploitation, talking about the 3 types, predation, herbivory, and parasitism.
And then we'll wrap up talking about mutualism and commensalism. After we discuss community interactions, then we'll shift our focus over to community structure and discuss trophic structure, species impact, and the bottom-up and top-down effects. Then we'll discuss community dynamics, including the intermediate disturbance hypothesis and ecological succession, including both primary and secondary ecological succession. And then last but not least, we'll shift our focus over to geographic impact, including effects of latitude and area on communities, and the island equilibrium model. And so this here concludes our brief introduction to community ecology, and we'll be able to learn a lot more moving forward.
So I'll see you all in our next video.
