Biodiversity
This is a measurement of how many species live in an area.
What is species richness?
Most keystone species fulfill this role in a food web.
What is an apex predator?
Without this ecosystem service, we would have no air to breathe.
What is oxygenation?
This type of organism forms a mutualism with plant roots. It increases the surface area of the plant roots.
What are fungi?
This type of organism forms the base of a food web.
What are autotrophs/producers?
This is a measurement of how many different species are found between two areas.
What is beta diversity.
The ecosystems in this national park nearly collapsed due to the removal of keystone species.
What is Yellowstone?
We rely on this ecosystem service for billions of dollars' worth of food every year.
What is pollination?
This is the most abundant element in Earth's atmosphere, but is not useful to plants until it gets into the soil.
What is nitrogen?
This type of organism can only gain energy by eating another organism.
What are heterotrophs/consumers?
This is the most species-rich group of animals.
What are insects?
The healthy equilibrium of these two species is vital to the preservation of Yellowstone.
What are wolves and elk?
This vital substance can take hundreds of thousands of years to form. Humans are depleting it at a rate of several inches per decade.
What is soil?
This is the ratio used to determine the quality of soil.
What is the N:P:K ratio?
This type of ecosystem is known for having especially complicated food webs.
What is a marine/aquatic ecosystem?
This metric tells us whether or not there are equal proportions of species living in an area.
What is species evenness?
This keystone species is vital to maintaining the kelp forests of the western United States.
What are sea otters?
This commodity has become physically weaker because we are harvesting it too early.
What is wood?
These plants are capable of nitrogen fixation.
What are beans/legumes?
This is the average percent of energy that moves between trophic levels.
What is 10%?
When this process happened in our atmosphere and in our oceans, it enabled the largest adaptive radiations in history.
What is oxygenation?
This animal, in the absence of predators, destroyed nearly 95% of the kelp forests in the United States.
What are sea urchins?
This type of organism recycles nutrients in an ecosystem.
What are decomposers?
These two elements are rare on Earth and usually only get into the soil due to erosion or human-made fertilizers.
What are phosphorus and potassium?
This is the process by which pollutants build up in an ecosystem as you go higher up the food web.
What is biomagnification?