Sustainability
This is what you call people continually wasting, depleting, and degrading much of Earth's natural capital.
What is environmental degradation?
Give four nonrenewable resources.
What are any type of rocks, minerals, and fossil fuels?
Process in which solar energy warms the troposphere as it reflects from Earth's surface and interacts with gases in the atmosphere.
What is the greenhouse effect?
This is the variety of processes (jobs) that occur within ecosystems, such as nutrient cycling and energy flow.
What is functional diversity?
This is the gradual establishment of communities of different species in mostly lifeless areas, where there is no soil or bottom sediment.
What is primary ecological succession?
This is the physical process by which warm, wet air or water rises and cold, dense air or water sinks.
What is convection?
This is the capacity of Earth's natural systems that support life to maintain stability or adapt to changing environmental conditions indefinitely. In other words, meeting our needs now without preventing future generations from meeting their needs.
What is sustainability?
Give the steps of the scientific method.
What are
ask a question, research the subject, form a hypothesis, experiment, analyze the results, do it again, make conclusions, and report results?
Name the seven phases of the water cycle.
What are evaporation, transpiration, condensation, precipitation, runoff, infiltration, and percolation?
These are characterized by a distinct climate and certain species (especially vegetation) that are able to survive there.
What are biomes?
This is when communities with different species develop in an ecosystem that has been disturbed or destroyed, but some soil or bottom sediment remains.
What is secondary ecological succession?
Define climate.
The pattern of atmospheric conditions in an area over periods ranging from at least three decades to thousands of years.
Materials and energy sources in nature that are essential or useful to humans are called ___.
What are natural resources?
Name four inexhaustible resources.
What are geothermal energy, solar energy, flowing water, and blowing wind.
Name four types of species interactions.
What are competition, predation, parasitism, commensalism, and mutualism?
What is a keystone species?
This is the maximum number of a species that a particular habitat can sustain indefinitely.
What is carrying capacity?
This is what we call mass movements of surface water driven by winds and shaped by landforms.
What are ocean currents?
This is what you call the natural resources and ecosystem services that keep humans/other species alive and support human economies.
What is natural capital?
Your body emitting heat after eating lunch is an example of which scientific law?
What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
If the biomass of kelp that supports an area's fish is known to contain 100,000 kcals of energy, and sea otters are eating the fish that forage on the kelp, what amount of energy, on average, could be expected to be transferred to the sea otters?
What is 1,000 kcal?
When members of a species get geographically isolated and evolve into two separate species over time.
What is speciation?
These are the biotic and abiotic components of an ecosystem that can affect the number of organisms in a population.
What are limiting factors?
These are the only trees that can tolerate salinated water.
What are mangrove trees?
This is the amount of land and water needed to supply an individual with renewable resources and to absorb/recycle the wastes/pollution such resource use produces. In other words, how much nature it takes to support a person.
What is ecological footprint?
Like a thermostat regulating the temperature in a home, this type of feedback loop has a stabilizing effect on a system.
What is a negative feedback loop?
Write the chemical equation for photosynthesis.
Carbon Dioxide + Water + Sunlight >>> Glucose + Oxygen
This is the process through which individuals with certain genetic traits are more likely to survive and reproduce under a specific set of environmental conditions.
What is natural selection?
Write the equation for population change.
What is
(births + immigrations) - (deaths + emigrations)
This is the tendency for a transition zone to have greater species diversity and a higher density of organisms than found in either of the individual ecosystems.
What is edge effect?