Shelford's Law of Tolerance
Ley de la tolerancia de Shelford
- Date
- 1911 · confidence high
- Place
- Chicago, Illinois, United States
- Credited to
- Victor Ernest Shelford
- Field
- Life & health
What was discovered
Shelford's law of tolerance states that an organism's success depends on a complex set of conditions, and that each species has a minimum, a maximum and an optimum for each environmental factor that determine its presence and abundance. It was formulated by American zoologist Victor Ernest Shelford in 1911, extending Liebig's law of the minimum by noting that factors act in concert.
What it led to
- Central concept of population ecology and autecology
- Basis for defining a species' ecological niche
- Application in species and habitat management