click below
click below
Normal Size Small Size show me how
ecology duncan
3-1,3-2,3-3,4-1,4-2,5-1,5-3,6-1,6-2,6-3
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Ecology | Scientific study of interactions among organisms and between organisms and their environmnent. |
| Biosphere | Part of Earth in which life exists including land, water, and air or atmosphere |
| Species | group of similar organisms that can breed and produce fertile offspring. |
| Population | group of individuals of the same speicies that live in the same area. |
| Community | assemblage of different populations that live together in a difined area |
| Ecosystem | collection of organisms that live in a particular place, together with their nonliving environment. |
| Autotroph | organism that can capture energy from sunlight or chemicals and use it to produce its own food from inorganic compounds |
| Heterotroph | organisims that rely other organisims for their energy and food supply |
| Food web | network of complex interactions formed by the feeding relationships amoung the various organisms in an ecosystem |
| Trophic level | step in food chain or food web |
| biomass | total amount of living tissue within a given trophic level |
| biogeochemichemical cycle | process by which elements, chemical compounds and other forms of matter are passed from one organism to another and from one part of a biosphere to another. |
| limiting nutrient | single nutrient that either is scarce or cycles very slowly, limiting growth of organisims in an ecosystem |
| weather | condition of earths atmosphere at a particular time and place |
| climate | average, year after year conditions of temperature and precipitin in a particular region. |
| green house effect | natural situation in which heat is retained in Earths atmosphere by carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and other gases. |
| biotic factor | biological influence on organisms within an ecosystem. |
| abiotic factor | physical, or nonliving, factor that shapes an ecosystem. |
| niche | full range of physical and biological conditions in which an organism lives and the way in which the organism uses those conditions |
| logistic growth | growth pattern in which a population's growth rate slows or stops following a period of exponential growth |
| carrying capacity | largest number of individuals of a population that a given environment can support |
| demography | scientific study of human populations |
| demographic transition | change in population from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates |
| green revolution | development of highly productive crop strains and the use of modern agricultural techniques to increase yields of food crop |
| renewable resource | resource that can regenerate quickly and that is replaceable. |
| pollutant | harmful material that can enter the biosphere through the land, air, or water |
| biodiversity | biological diversity, the sum total of the variety of organisms in the atmosphere |
| biological magnification | increasing concentration of a harmful substance in organisms at higher trophic levels in food chain or food web |