Natural Selection and Evolution
Variants of genes that account for the diversity of traits seen in a population
What are alleles?
The complete loss of a species
What is extinction?
Essential ecological processes that make life on Earth possible
What are ecosystem services?
A species at high risk of becoming extinct
What is an endangered species?
A non-native species whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health
What is an invasive species?
The process by which organisms best adapted to the environment (the fitter) survive to reproduce, leaving more offspring than less well-adapted individuals
What is natural selection?
A process in which humans decide which individuals breed and which do not in an attempt to produce a population with desired traits
What is artificial selection?
The heritable variation among individuals of a single population or within the species as a whole
What is genetic diversity?
A management strategy that focuses on protecting one particular species
What is single species conservation?
The process by which a species becomes locally extinct in one geographic area but still found elsewhere
What is extirpation?
A change in the DNA sequence
What is a mutation?
Period where species have gone extinct at much greater rates than the background extinction rate
What is a mass extinction?
The variety of species, including how many are present and their relative abundance
What is species diversity?
Geographic spaces on land or at sea that are recognized, dedicated, and managed to achieve long- term conservation of nature
What are protected areas?
Low-impact travel to natural areas that contributes to the protection of the environment and respects the local people
What is ecotourism?
Occurs when two species each provide the selective pressure that determines which traits are favored by natural selection in the other
What is coevolution?
The situation that occurs when population size is drastically reduced, leading to the loss of some genetic variants, and resulting in a less diverse population
What is the bottleneck effect?
A species that is native to a particular area and is not naturally found elsewhere
What is an endemic species?
An arrangement in which a wealthy nation forgives the debt of a lower-income nation in return for a pledge to protect natural areas in that lower-income nation
What is debt-for-nature swap?
A species that are endangered or at risk of becoming endangered in the near future
What is a threatened species?
The process by which organisms change over time as a population experiences changes in the gene frequencies
What is evolution?
The change in gene frequencies of a population over time due to random events that result in the loss of some gene variants
What is genetic drift?
An object’s or species’ worth, based on its usefulness to humans
What is instrumental value?
A nonprofit organization set up to protect land under its care
What is a land trust?
An object’s or species’ worth, based on its mere existence
What is intrinsic value?