Biodiversity Basics
What are the three levels of biodiversity?
What are genetic, species, and habitat diversity?
Goods taken directly from ecosystems by humans, such as lumber or fish, fall into this category of services.
What are Provisioning services?
According to the theory of island biogeography, which type of island will have the greatest species richness?
What is a large island close to the mainland?
What type of species is the first fast-growing organism to colonize a new or disturbed area?
What is a pioneer species?
What is the term for the range of conditions an organism can endure before injury or death results?
What is ecological tolerance?
What term describes a sudden, drastic drop in population size that leaves survivors with only a fraction of the original genetic variation?
What is a population bottleneck?
Recreation, tourism, and scientific knowledge are examples of this category of ecosystem services.
What are Cultural services?
Give an example of a "habitat island" that is completely surrounded by land, not water.
What is a city park, mountaintop, or isolated forest fragment?
What is the primary difference in starting conditions between primary and secondary succession?
What is primary starts on bare rock with no soil, while secondary starts where soil already remains?
What happens to an organism when conditions push it into the zone of physiological stress?
What is it survives, but shows reduced growth, reproduction, or activity?
Why does habitat loss typically affect specialist species before generalist species?
What is specialists have narrow niches and depend on specific foods/conditions, leaving them nowhere to go when habitat is removed?
What regulating ecosystem service do wetlands provide that helps protect coastal towns from severe storms?
What is flood control / buffering waves?
Why do larger islands generally support a lower extinction rate than smaller islands?
What is they have more resources and more habitat diversity, which supports larger populations?
Provide one example of a keystone species and describe its crucial role in its ecosystem.
What is a sea otter controlling urchins to protect kelp (or beavers building dams to create wetlands)?
Why do ranges of tolerance vary among individuals within the exact same population?
What is genetic variation gives some individuals traits that allow them to tolerate more extreme conditions?
What two specific factors are combined to determine a community's species diversity?
What are species richness and species evenness?
How do supporting services functionally differ from the other three categories of ecosystem services?
What is they are the underlying processes (like nutrient cycling) that make all the other benefits possible?
What evolutionary process occurs when limited resources push an ancestral island species to evolve into many different specialized species?
What is adaptive radiation?
During which stage of succession is net primary productivity (NPP) generally the highest?
What is the early to intermediate stages?
Besides temperature, name two other abiotic water conditions that aquatic organisms have a range of tolerance for.
What are salinity, flow rate, sunlight, pH, or dissolved oxygen?
Explain the specific mechanism for why a population with high genetic diversity is more likely to survive a new disease outbreak.
What is it is more likely to contain individuals with alleles resistant to the disease, who will survive and reproduce?
Describe the chain of events from a human activity clearing a wetland to a specific economic consequence.
What is clearing wetlands removes the natural water-filtering service, causing the town to pay more money to treat its drinking water (or similar valid chain)?
Explain why invasive species are a particularly severe threat to island ecosystems compared to mainland ecosystems.
What is island species evolve as specialists with few competitors, so invasive generalists can easily outcompete them for resources?
Describe the long-term trend of total biomass and species richness as an abandoned field undergoes succession into a mature climax forest.
What is total biomass increases and then levels off, while species richness peaks at intermediate stages and then declines?
Explain why a species with a very narrow range of tolerance makes a highly effective indicator species for pollution.
What is it will decline or disappear quickly with even minor environmental changes, signaling the ecosystem is degraded?