Spheres
The envelope of gases around the Earth necessary for life, including Oxygen, Carbon Dioxide, and Nitrogen.
What is the Atmosphere?
Non-living chemical or physical components that affect living organisms.
What are Abiotic factors?
The process by which green plants capture solar energy & combine that with water & carbon dioxide to form carbohydrates.
What is photosynthesis?
The scientific study of the distribution & abundance of organisms & the interactions that determine distribution & abundance.
What is ecology?
The ecological interaction where one animal consumes another as food.
What is predation or true predation?
All of the liquid water in streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans, solid ice in glaciers and the polar caps, plus water vapor and precipitation in the atmosphere.
What is the hydrosphere?
Living components that affect other organisms or ecosystem functioning.
What are biotic factors?
The process by which green plants and heterotrophic organisms such as animals and fungi break down carbohydrates using oxygen to release energy and carbon dioxide.
What is respiration?
The iterative process of asking questions, forming hypotheses, and testing those hypothesis through structured enquiry and/or experimentation.
What is the scientific method?
The ecological interaction where an animal consumes a plant as food.
What is herbivory?
All of the living organisms on Planet Earth: microbes, plants and animals.
What is the Biosphere?
The set of resources an individual organism needs to survive.
What is a niche or an ecological niche?
The movement of water from the roots of a plant, up through its stem or trunk, along branches and out to leaf surfaces and into the atmosphere.
What is transpiration or evapotranspiration?
Plant & animal distributions; movement of species, material & energy; fluctuations in abundance; and relationships between organisms and groups of organisms.
What do ecologists study?
The ecological interaction in which two organisms both benefit as a result.
What is mutualism?
The rocks and non-living components of soil (clay, sand, and silt).
What is the Lithosphere?
The result of how biotic factors interact to determine which species live together in the same location.
What is community structure?
The process of initial soil formation caused by water & wind action creating fine substrates from rocks.
What is erosion?
The development and testing of theoretical new knowledge.
What is (a) pure science?
True predation, herbivory and parasitism are all types of this ecological interaction.
What is predation?
The process by which particles settle to the bottom of water bodies, eventually and potentially creating new rock over geologic time.
What is sedimentation?
A group of individuals of the same species living & interacting together in the same location.
What is an ecological population?
The ecological interaction in which one organism benefits while the other is unaffected.
What is commensalism?