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ecologyhanson
Biology
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What is ecology? | It is the scientific study of interactions among organisms and between organisms and their environment |
| What is a biosphere? | It is the part of Earth in which life exists including land, water, and air or atmosphere |
| What is a species? | It is a group of similar organisms that can breed and produce fertile offspring. |
| What is a population? | It is a group of individuals of the same species that live in the same area. |
| What is a community? | It is an assemblage of different populations that live together in a defined area. |
| What is an ecosystem? | It is a collection of all the organisms that live in a particular place, together with their nonliving environment. |
| What is an autotroph? | It is an organism that can capture energy from sunlight or chemicals and use it to produce its own food from inorganic compunds; also called a producer. |
| What is a heterotroph? | Its is an organism that obtains energy from the food it consumes; also called a consumer. |
| What is a food web? | It is a network of complex interactions formed by the feeding relationships among the various organisms in an ecosystem. |
| What is a trophic level? | It is a step in the food chain or food web. |
| What is biomass? | It is the total amount of living tissue within a given trophic level. |
| What is the biogeochemical cycle? | It is the process in which elements, chemical compunds, and other forms of matter are passed from one organism to another and from one part of the biosphere to another. |
| What is a limiting nutrient? | It is the single nutrient that either is scarce or cycles very slowly, limiting the growth of organisms in an ecosystem. |
| What is weather? | It is the condition of Earth's atmosphere at a particular time and place. |
| What is climate? | It is the average, year-after-year conditions of temperature and precipitation in a particular region. |
| What is the green house effect? | It is the natural situation in which heat is retained in Earth's atmosphere by carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and other gases. |
| What is biotic factor? | It is the biological influence on organisms within an ecosystem. |
| What is Abiotic factor? | It is the physical, or nonliving, factor that shapes an ecosystem. |
| What is a niche? | It is a full range of physical and biological conditions in which an organism lives and the way in which the organism uses those conditions. |
| What is logistic growth? | It is the growth pattern in which a population's growth rate slows or stops following a period of exponential growth. |
| What is carrying capacity? | It is the largest number of individuals of a population that a given environment can support. |
| What is demography? | It is the scientific study of human populations. |
| What is demographic transition? | It is the change in polulation from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates. |
| What is green revolution? | It is the development of highly reproductive crop strains and the use of modern agricultural techniques to increase yields of food crops. |
| What is renewable resource? | It is a resource that can regenerate quickly and that is replacable. |
| What is a pollutant? | It is a harmful material that can enter the biosphere through the land, air, or water. |
| What is biodiversity? | It is biological diversity; the sum total of the variety of organisms in the biosphere. |
| What is biological magnification? | It is the increasing concentration of a harmful substance in organisms at higher trophic levels in a food chain or food web. |