Major Spheres
The 4 major spheres.
What are the biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere?
A complex network of food chains.
What is a food web?
The amount of energy lost with each transfer of energy from one tropic level to the next.
What is approximately 90%?
The two possible paths of precipitation once it reaches a land surface.
What are infiltration that replenishes groundwater and runoff that ends up in lakes and rivers?
The process that warms the troposphere in which solar energy interacts with carbon dioxide, water vapor, and other gases in the air.
What is the greenhouse effect?
The layer of the atmosphere where the ozone layer is found.
What is the stratosphere?
A group of individuals of the same species living in a particular area.
What is a population?
The rate at which producers convert radiant energy into chemical energy.
What is gross primary productivity?
The way in which the human activity of burning fossil fuels affects the carbon cycle.
What is by adding carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
The components of the biosphere that utilize cellular respiration.
What are all living things?
The approximate percentage of fresh water in the hydrosphere.
The trophic level in which cows eating grass are categorized.
What is primary consumer?
The equation that best represents net primary productivity.
The chemical form in which nitrogen exists in the atmosphere.
What is N2?
The equation that best represents the process of photosynthesis.
The ductile layer of the geosphere beneath the lithosphere.
What is the asthenosphere?
What are detritivores?
The reason why the open ocean is able to produce more of Earth's stored chemical energy per year than any other ecosystem or life zone despite having low net primary productivity.
What is the large scale of the oceans?
The nutrient cycle that does not have any paths through the atmosphere.
What is the phosphorous cycle?
The two pathways through which carbon is cycled within the biosphere.
What are photosynthesis and aerobic respiration?
Examples of how the biosphere exists within the other 3 spheres.
Answers will vary.
Example:
Bacteria in the soil are part of the biosphere but are located in the geosphere.
Terrestrial plants are part of the biosphere, but are located in the atmosphere.
Fish are part of the biosphere, but are located in the hydrosphere.
The equation that best represents the process of aerobic respiration.
The reason why there are so few top predators in an ecosystem when compared with the number of primary consumers.
What is the amount of usable energy available to top predators is much less than the amount of energy available to those on lower trophic levels, especially producers?
The main source of silicon in terrestrial ecosystems.
What is mineral weathering?
The reason why only 10% of energy is transferred from one link in a food chain to the next link.
What is that organisms use chemical energy obtained through food to fuel their life processes by converting the chemical energy into other forms of energy, and when that energy is converted most of it escapes into the environment as heat.