Ecosystems Vocab
The largest population of a species that an ecosystem can support long-term.
What is carrying capacity?
What is pollution/habitat destruction/storms/fires/flood/drought, etc.
The process by which producers convert light energy into glucose.
What is photosynthesis?
Land that is permanently frozen.
What is permafrost?
Food, water, space, and predators can all be examples of this.
What is a limiting factor?
If a drought causes less water to be available, what would most likely happen to the carrying capacity of deer?
What is it would decrease?
Glucose + oxygen > carbon dioxide + water + energy.
What is cellular respiration?
Partially decayed plant material that builds up in cold, wet, low-oxygen environments and stores carbon for thousands of years.
What is peat?
A group of individuals of the same species living in the same area.
What is a population?
A species that has a very big effect on its ecosystem, even though there may not be many of them.
What is keystone species?
True or false: cellular respiration occurs only in animal cells.
What is false? (Plants do it too.)
The movement of carbon among the atmosphere, living things, oceans, and Earth.
What is the carbon cycle?
All of the living things in the entire world.
What is the Biosphere?
The variety of different species living in an ecosystem.
What is biodiversity?
In photosynthesis, plants absorb these two inputs and release these two products.
What are carbon dioxide and water in, and oxygen and glucose out?
A natural or artificial reservoir (such as a forest, ocean, or soil) that absorbs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it releases.
What is a carbon sink?
What do we call all the different populations of living things that live and interact in the same area?
What is a community?
An ecosystem's ability to recover and return to its original state after a disturbance.
What is resilience?
Microorganisms break down dead matter and return nutrients and carbon to the ecosystem in this process, which is a type of cellular respiration.
What is decomposition?
This human activity is a major cause of the long-term increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
What is burning fossil fuels?