Land & Water Use
Planting different crops in sequential seasons to restore soil nutrients and prevent pest buildup.
What is crop rotation?
This process, performed by plants and algae, removes CO2 from the atmosphere and is a key part of the carbon cycle.
What is photosynthesis?
The type of succession that begins on bare rock or after a glacial retreat, where soil must first be formed.
What is primary succession?
The maximum population size an environment can sustain indefinitely given available resources, often denoted by a single letter.
What is carrying capacity (K)?
At this type of plate boundary, plates move apart, leading to sea-floor spreading and the creation of new crust.
What is a divergent boundary?
An agricultural method that delivers water directly to plant roots, minimizing evaporation and runoff.
What is drip irrigation?
The percentage of energy transferred from one trophic level to the next, explaining why food chains are short.
What is 10%?
This type of symbiosis benefits one organism while the other is neither helped nor harmed, like a barnacle on a whale.
What is commensalism?
This type of age-structure diagram, shaped like a pyramid, indicates a rapidly growing population with a high youth dependency ratio.
What is an expansive/rapid growth diagram?
The three soil particles, from largest to smallest.
What are sand, silt, and clay?
The three primary macronutrients in fertilizer, represented by the letters N, P, and K.
What are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium?
In the nitrogen cycle, this is the process where bacteria convert ammonia (NH3) into nitrites and then nitrates (NO2- & NO3-).
What is nitrification?
The theory that predicts larger islands and islands closer to a mainland will have higher species richness due to higher immigration and lower extinction rates.
What is the Theory of Island Biogeography?
The average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, with 2.1 generally considered the replacement level in developed countries.
What is the Total Fertility Rate (TFR)?
This atmospheric layer contains the ozone layer, which absorbs UV radiation.
What is the stratosphere?
An infamous pesticide that bioaccumulates and biomagnifies in food webs, causing eggshell thinning in birds like the bald eagle.
What is DDT?
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane
A major carbon sink where carbon is stored in the form of calcium carbonate in marine organisms' shells and skeletons.
What is the ocean?
What are you the 5 components of HIPPO?
Habitat loss, Invasive species, Pollution, Population (human), and Overharvesting
Species characterized by a Type I survivorship curve, low fecundity, high parental care, and logistic growth near their carrying capacity.
What are K-selected species?
The process where excess nutrients (N & P) lead to algal blooms, hypoxia, and dead zones in aquatic ecosystems.
What is eutrophication?
A pest management strategy that combines biological, chemical, and cultural practices to minimize economic and environmental harm.
What is Integrated Pest Management (IPM)?
The name for the zone in a lake where sunlight penetrates, allowing photosynthesis, and the deeper zone where it does not.
What are the limnetic zone and the benthic zone?
The measure of biodiversity that counts the number of different species present in an area, without considering their relative abundance.
What is species richness?
The formula to calculate the growth rate of a population, given its crude birth rate, crude death rate, immigration, and emigration.
What is (CBR + Immigration) - (CDR + Emigration) / 10 = % growth rate?
The periodic warming of central/eastern Pacific Ocean surface waters that disrupts normal weather patterns, causing droughts in some areas and flooding in others.
What is La Niño?