Words similar to microcosm
Example sentences for: microcosm
How can you use “microcosm” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:
In the English-speaking dictionary microcosm The Oxford Thesaurus (1991), has clearly stolen a march over all its rivals in terms of size, structure, and depth of treatment.
Experimental evidence from microcosm studies indicates that climatic change may alter community stability if individual populations composing the community exhibit weak density dependence, or if climate change influences interspecific interactions [ 33 ] . While we caution against drawing general conclusions from this analysis, our results suggest that climatic change has the potential to influence the stability of this community by altering the dynamics and stability at any single, or all three, of the individual trophic levels.
Microcosm and mesocosm studies are commonly used in ecological studies of aquatic and terrestrial habitats [ 1 2 3 ] . Microcosms and mesocosms are generally subsets of communities and abiotic factors of particular ecosystems, with restricted exchange of matter and energy [ 3 ] . These containers are by definition smaller than the organism's actual habitat, and controversy exists about the relevance of these studies because of the scaling of simulated habitats and the lack of replication and complexity [ 1 3 4 5 ] . There is often an implicit, and untested, assumption that scaling doesn't affect experimental outcomes in microcosm studies [ 3 ] .
In this experiment, we independently varied different dimensions of small aquatic habitats to look at how microcosm design choices may affect experimental outcomes, and how natural changes in habitat size and shape may affect aquatic insect larvae in a potentially resource-limited environment.
Finally, we hypothesized that effects of leaf litter quantity could interact with effects of container size, as increased leaf litter may compensate for lower wall area per unit volume, since microbes grow, and mosquitoes browse, on leaf litter [ 22 ] . High food abundance appears to decrease stress and compensate for detrimental abiotic factors [ 11 27 29 ] . Our experimental design allowed us to test for both vertical and horizontal surface area effects, which may be both natural effects of changing habitat size or artifacts of experimental microcosm design [ 3 ] .
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