Abiotic Factors
This factor allows aquatic life to breathe and function, similarly to humans.
What is Dissolved Oxygen?
The excessive enrichment of a water body with nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, due to human activities such as agriculture, wastewater discharge, and urban runoff.
What is Cultural Eutrophication.
A foundational U.S. environmental law aimed at restoring and maintaining the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters.
What is Clean Water Act?
A rapid increase in the population of algae in an aquatic system, often caused by an excess of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.
What is Algal Bloom?
These are microorganisms like viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protozoans that live outside a host in the environment.
What are Pathogens?
This factor can be essential to aquatic life as they form the starting material that organisms use to make several compounds that are necessary for life.
What is Nitrate?
An area of a body of water where oxygen levels are too low to support most marine life.
What is Dead Zone?
The initial physical process in wastewater treatment that removes large solids and debris from sewage before further purification
What is Primary Sewage Treatment?
Graphically represents how dissolved oxygen (DO) levels decrease and then recover downstream from a source of organic pollution.
What is Oxygen Sag Curve?
These are crucial for breaking down pollutants and recycling nutrients in oxygen-rich environments like soil and water.
What is Aerobic Bacteria?
This factor helps protect aquatic life and prevent a decrease in various populations.
What is Phosphate?
Where solids settle to the bottom and oils float to the top, while wastewater is partially treated through anaerobic digestion.
What is Septic Tank?
The advanced stage of wastewater purification, following primary and secondary treatments, that uses physical, chemical, or biological processes to remove remaining pollutants, nutrients, and pathogens.
What is Tertiary Sewage Treatment?
This represents the water beneath the Earth's surface stored in aquifers.
What is Groundwater?
This factor is essential to maintaining aquatic life and the aesthetic quality of streams and lakes.
What is Biological Oxygen Demand?
A single, identifiable source that releases contaminants into the environment.
What is Point Source?
A biological process that uses microorganisms to remove dissolved and suspended organic matter from wastewater that remains after primary treatment.
What is Secondary Sewage Treatment?
These are crucial for decomposition and biogeochemical cycles, playing key roles in the breakdown of organic matter in oxygen-poor environments like deep-sea sediments and wetlands.
What are Anaerobic Bacteria?
This factor tries to establish themselves in rivers and other bodies of water to contaminate the area.
What is Fecal Coliform?
A form of pollution that comes from many diffuse sources rather than a single, identifiable point, and is often carried by storm water runoff.
What is Non Point Source?
The primary U.S. federal law in environmental science that ensures the quality of public drinking water by mandating health-based standards, monitoring, and source protection.
What is Safe Drinking Water Act?
This is an underground layer of rock or sediment that holds and transmits groundwater.
What is Aquifer?