Biodiversity & Sustainability
The variety of different living organisms found in an area.
What is biodiversity?
This economic principle describes how price and availability are affected by how much people want something and how much of it is available.
What is the law of supply and demand?
These are beliefs or priorities that people use when making choices about the environment.
What are environmental values?
A possible danger or chance of harm that scientists or decision makers consider.
What is risk?
The entire group of people, organisms, or objects that a scientist wants to study.
What is a population?
Meeting the needs of people today while protecting resources for future generations.
What is sustainability?
When demand for a product increases while the supply stays limited, the price will generally move in this direction.
What is up?
The Unit 2 review asks students to identify five different values that can affect environmental decision making.
What are the five environmental values?
The Unit 2 review describes risk as the ______ hypotheses to answer questions.
What is testing?
A smaller group selected from a larger population for study.
What is a sample?
This measurement estimates how much land and water a person or population needs to support its use of resources.
What is an ecological footprint?
Garrett Hardin used this idea to describe what can happen when individuals use a shared resource for their own benefit.
What is “The Tragedy of the Commons”?
A person may support protecting a wetland because they value wildlife, while another person may want to develop the land for economic reasons. This is an example of this.
What is a conflict between values?
A tool that helps people organize information and make choices about an environmental problem.
What is a decision-making model?
This term describes where organisms, objects, or data are located within an area.
What is distribution?
A community with many different kinds of organisms has a high level of this.
What is biodiversity?
In “The Tragedy of the Commons,” individuals may use too much of a shared resource because they receive the personal benefit while the costs are shared by everyone.
What is overuse of a common resource?
A decision about an environmental issue can involve more than science because people may have different beliefs about money, nature, society, or other priorities.
What are environmental values?
When scientists use hypotheses to help answer questions about an environmental problem, they are using this process.
What is testing hypotheses?
A relationship in which two variables change or are related to each other.
What is correlation?
Using natural resources in a way that allows those resources to remain available for the future is an example of this idea.
What is sustainability?
A community must decide whether to protect a shared forest or allow increased logging for economic benefit. This situation demonstrates a conflict between environmental concerns and this type of value.
What is an economic value?
A town must choose between protecting a natural area and using the land for a new business. The disagreement occurs because different groups place different importance on these.
What are values?
Scientists may use evidence, possible outcomes, and risks to help choose between different solutions to an environmental problem. This is an example of this process.
What is environmental decision making?
The group in an experiment that does not receive the experimental treatment and provides a comparison.
What is a control group?