Energy Flow & Trophic Levels
While chemicals and nutrients cycle within an ecosystem, energy is characterized by this type of "one-way" movement.
What is a one-way flow?
This term describes the total amount of light energy converted to chemical energy by autotrophs during a given time period.
What is Gross Primary Production (GPP)?
The Hubbard Brook experiment demonstrated that the loss of nutrients from a forest ecosystem is primarily controlled by this factor.
What is/are vegetation/plants?
This terrestrial biome is characterized by permafrost and very cold temperatures that restrict root growth.
What is the tundra?
This percentage represents the average amount of energy transferred from one trophic level to the next.
What is 10%?
These autotrophs for the base of the food web by building organic molecules using sunlight or inorganic compounds
What are primary producers?
This value is calculated by taking the GPP and subtracting the energy used by autotrophs for their own cellular respiration.
What is Net Primary Production (NPP)?
This cycle is unique because its primary reservoirs are in sedimentary rocks rather than the atmosphere.
What is the phosporus cycle?
This aquatic zone is the upper layer of water that receives enough light to support photosynthesis.
What is the photic zone?
This restoration strategy uses organisms - like uranium-metabolizing bacteria - to detoxify polluted ecosystems.
What is bioremediation?
This law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transferred or transformed.
What is the First Law of Thermodynamics?
If this measurement is greater than zero, an ecosystem is gaining more carbon than it is losing, acting as a carbon sink.
What is Net Ecosystem Production (NEP)?
In this cycle, bacteria must perform "fixation" to convert a gas into a form that plants can actually use.
What is the Nitrogen Cycle?
This is the largest terrestrial biome on Earth, dominated by cone-bearing evergreen trees.
What is the northern coniferous forest (or taiga)?
This strategy adds essential materials (like nitrogen-fixing plants) to a degraded ecosystem to speed up recovery.
What is biological augmentation?
These heterotrophs, such as fungi and many prokaryotes, get their energy from nonliving organic matter called detritus.
What are decomposers?
This is the specific element that must be added for production to increase in a particular area, such as nitrogen in many marine environments.
What is a limiting nutrient?
These two processes are the primary ways carbon is taken up from and released back into the atmosphere.
What are photosynthesis and cellular respiration?
This temperature boundary in oceans and lakes separates the warm upper layer from the cold deeper layer.
What is the thermocline?
These nonliving components of an environment, such as temperature and light, strongly influence the distribution of organisms.
What are abiotic factors?
According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, energy conversions are never 100% efficient because some energy is always lost at this.
What is heat?
This process, often caused by sewage or fertilizer runoff, leads to algal blooms and oxygen depletion in lakes.
What is eutrophication?
These are four major factors ecologists consider when studying the cycles of water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus.
What are biological importance, forms available to life, reservoirs, and key processes?
These highly productive transition zones occur where a river meets the sea and have varying levels of salinity.
This ecological phenomenon involves the rapid evolution of an ancestral species into many diverse species after dispersing to a new area.
What is adaptive radiation?