Biomes
Major regions of differing vegetation and wildlife types
What are Biomes?
A representation of the conversion of energy from producers to the different levels of consumers modeled as a pyramid in which the amount of energy or biomass at each level of the ecosystem is represented by the relative size of that part of the pyramid.
What is an Energy Pyramid?
The very small fraction of organic matter present in the biosphere that gets buried in sediments before they can decompose and can be fossilized and eventually may turn into coal, oil, and natural gas.
What are Fossil Fuels?
The average amount of time a quantity of a variable stays in a given pool.
What is Residence time (MRT)?
Transitional areas between the strictly terrestrial and aquatic.
What are Wetlands?
The wettest and warmest biome is the tropical rainforest, such as those in the Amazon and in western and central Africa. It contains a high plant and animal diversity. Ecosystem productivity is high, but much of the ecosystem’s energy and nutrients are tied up in the vegetation, and the soils are often extremely poor in mineral nutrients.
What is a Tropical Rainforest (Evergreen)?
A spatially specific unit of the Earth—such as a lake, a forest, a swamp, etc.—that includes every organism, along with all components of the abiotic environment within its boundaries.”
What is an Ecosystem?
The 4 processes that run the carbon cycle.
The movement of water through the atmosphere and over the surface of the Earth.
What is the Hydrologic Cycle?
The conversion of organic matter to ammonium.
What is ammonification?
One of the 3 broad types of wetlands that makes up 91 percent of all wetlands in the continental and includes bogs, marshes, swamps, and peatlands and differ from open waters by having water at or near the soil surface for most of the year, but rarely more than two meters deep.
What are Freshwater Wetlands?
A process in which physical, chemical, and some biological agents cause the relatively rapid injury or death of organisms and the damage or collapse of the biotic component of the ecosystem.
What is a "Disturbance?"
When large areas of forest, particularly tropical forest, have been converted to pastures, grassland, and crop lands, and the trees they contained have been burned and not replaced.
What is slash-and-burn agriculture?
The conversion of N2 gas to a plant-available form, ammonium (NH4+)
What is nitrogen fixation?
The loss of water from the stomates (openings) in leaves during photosynthesis.
What is Transpiration?
Global variation in the amount of the Sun's energy hitting different parts of the Earth and also the cause of global atmospheric circulation and global oceanic circulation.
What is solar energy flux?
The rate at which an ecosystem returns to its original state after some sort of disturbance causes a change.
What is "Resilience?"
The movement of carbon compounds through the atmosphere, oceans, and living organisms. In which, Carbon is taken up from the atmosphere and oceans via photosynthesis and is released back into the atmosphere via respiration and decomposition.
What is the Carbon Cycle?
PRECIP (precipitation)= Et (evapotranspiration)+ I (infiltration)+ RO (runoff)
What is the (equation for the) Hydrologic Cycle?
Where an element or molecule is washed out of soil by moving water, occurring in almost all ecosystems.
What is Leaching?
In the Northern Hemisphere, air masses move/deflect toward the right; In the Southern Hemisphere, air masses move/deflect toward the left.
What is (an example of) the Coriolis Effect?
A hypothesis that suggests in ecosystems that do not change, competitive exclusion will eventually lead to the domination of one species. This hypothesis proposes when disturbances occur periodically, population sizes of major competitors never reach a level at which they can dominate an ecosystem, and population sizes of other species are never driven too close to zero.
What is the intermediate disturbance hypothesis?
A process of converting solar energy into chemical energy, in which, carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere (by terrestrial plants) and the ocean (by phytoplankton) and incorporated into plant material such as leaves, roots, and shoots.
What is Carbon Fixation?
Cycles in which elements and nutrients drive the interaction of an ecosystem’s living and nonliving components and elements continually cycle within the biosphere, between the biosphere, soils, and water as plants and animals grow, die, and decompose.
What are Biogeochemical Cycles?
Abrupt changes in the temperature of water with depth that prevents the mixing of the layers of water, often influencing lake and pond ecosystems.
What is Thermoclines?