The Environment & Sustainability
An interdisciplinary study of connections in the natural environment
What is environmental science
Anything that has mass and takes up space
What is matter?
The element that makes up 21% of the atmosphere
What is oxygen?
The earth’s variety of deserts, grasslands, forests, mountains, oceans, lakes, rivers, and wetlands
What is ecosystem diversity?
Where groundwater accumulates.
What is an aquifer?
Can be found in fixed quantity, or stock, in the earth’s crust
What is Inexhaustible resources?
Another term for the number of protons in an atom
What is atomic number?
A group of individuals of the same species living in a particular place
What is a population?
Altering an organism’s genetic material by adding, deleting, or changing segments of its DNA to produce desirable traits or to eliminate undesirable ones
What is genetic engineering?
The nutrient is cycled through the biosphere by a combination of photosynthesis and aerobic respiration.
What is carbon?
amount of land and water needed to supply a person with renewable resources and to absorb and recycle the wastes and pollution produced
What is ecological footprint?
Another term for the number of neutrons and protons in an atom.
What is atomic mass?
Where you find ozone.
What is the stratosphere?
Place or type of ecosystem in which a species lives
What is a habitat?
How nitrogen dioxide gas and nitric acid vapor return to the earth.
What is acid deposition?
The term for the ability of an area’s ecosystems to regenerate renewable resources of a given region within a given time and to absorb related pollution and wastes
A solution that has more hydrogen ions than hydroxide ions and a pH less than 7
What is an acidic solution?
Water is released into the air from plants
What is transpiration?
Species that provide early warning signs of environmental change.
What is an indicator species?
Fertilizers disrupt this cycle.
What is the phosphorous cycle?
______ can actually encourage companies to conduct business in ways that result in environmental degradation.
Government Subsidies
The Law of Conservation of Energy is also know as this.
What is the 1st Law of Thermodynamics?
If the biomass of flowers that support the butterflies was known to contain 100,000 units of energy, and certain bird species were eating the butterflies that foraged on the flowers, the amount of energy expected to be transferred to the birds?
What is 1,000?
The other scientist besides Charles Darwin who proposed the concept of natural selection.
Who is Alfred Russel Wallace?
The nutrient that has the biggest effect on the Earth's atmosphere.
What is carbon?