Microenvironment
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A very small area that has different characteristics than its surroundings; the milieu (set of conditions) within this area.
"What was seen from the top down, as a large environment with many difficult trade-offs, is instead seen from the bottom up--as 10 million microenvironments, each to be regulated in its own right. It is this inversion of perspective that distinguishes microgovernment from other kinds of regulation, and that accounts for its often-bizarre behavior."
- 2 A very small area that has different characteristics than its surroundings; the milieu (set of conditions) within this area.; Synonym of microhabitat.
- 3 A very small area that has different characteristics than its surroundings; the milieu (set of conditions) within this area.; The very small environment in the immediate vicinity of an organism.
"As with the Lejeuneaceae, this pattern of massive speciation appears to be correlated with the Cretaceous explosion of the angiosperms and the simultaneous creation of a host of new microenvironments, differing in humidity, light intensity, texture, etc."
Synonyms
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More examples"What was seen from the top down, as a large environment with many difficult trade-offs, is instead seen from the bottom up--as 10 million microenvironments, each to be regulated in its own right. It is this inversion of perspective that distinguishes microgovernment from other kinds of regulation, and that accounts for its often-bizarre behavior."
Etymology
From micro- + environment.
More for "microenvironment"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.