Non-living components of an organism's surroundings.
What are abiotic environmental factors?
100
The scientific study of the distribution and abundance of organisms and the interactions that determine distribution and abundance.
What is ecology?
100
The process by which organisms adapt to their environment through the process of passing on heritable traits to their offspring that allow higher chances of survival and successful reproduction.
What is natural selection?
100
A tentative explanation for an observable phenomenon.
What is an hypothesis?
100
The phenomenon that urban locations are usually warmer than their surrounding more rural areas due to the dense, built environment, relative lack of vegetation, and abundance of non-reflective surfaces.
What is the Urban Heat Island Effect?
200
A chemical element required in relatively large amounts for survival for all plants and animals.
What is a macronutrient?
200
A group of individuals of the same species living and interacting together in the same location.
What is an ecological population?
200
The commonly-used method for visually displaying evolutionary and ancestral relationships between species.
What is a phylogenetic (or evolutionary) tree?
200
All possible measurable units or observations defined by the variable one is measuring.
What is a statistical population?
200
Lower heating and cooling costs, reduction in storm water run-off, and habitat resources for urban wildlife.
What are some benefits of an urban green roof?
300
The reflection of solar radiation by the Earth's surface.
What is albedo?
300
Populations of different species living and interacting in the same location plus the non-living (abiotic) factors that they interact with.
What is an ecosystem?
300
Lab experiments, field experiments, genetic comparisons, and fossil records.
What are sources of evolutionary evidence?
300
A quantitative and calculable measure of how much variability there is within a dataset.
What is variance, standard deviation, or standard error?
300
The practice of renewing degraded, damaged, or destroyed ecosystems through active intervention and management.
What is restoration ecology?
400
The non-living components of the earth that relate to rocks and soil.
What is the lithosphere?
400
The set of resources and conditions that an individual species needs to survive.
What is an ecological niche?
400
The process by which mutations spread between successive generations purely by chance instead of via natural selection.
What is genetic drift?
400
Abundance, age structure, spatial distribution, and frequency.
What are measurable variables of an ecological population?
400
Turbidity, E. coli levels, and dissolved oxygen content.
What are measures of urban water quality?
500
"Everything that is not me."
What is Einstein's definition of the environment?
500
Interactions between species, and between organisms and their abiotic environment define this in terms of the number and abundance of species that live together in the same place.
What is community structure?
500
Variability, heritability, and differential survival.
What are the three conditions of natural selection.
500
Their high diversity, specialization, ease of sampling, and sensitivity to change and disturbance.
What are reasons to measure invertebrate populations and diversity in ecological studies?
500
A legally-binding agreement to protect land and prevent certain types of development with a view to protecting natural resources.