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A comprehensive overview of the various biomes and ecosystems that make up the earth's diverse environments. It delves into the characteristics, climate patterns, and human impacts on different biomes, including tropical rainforests, deserts, grasslands, temperate deciduous forests, tundra, and aquatic ecosystems. The intricate relationships between the biotic and abiotic components of these ecosystems, as well as the critical role of nutrient cycles, energy flow, and ecological succession in maintaining the balance of these natural systems. It also highlights the significant human influence on these environments, such as deforestation, desertification, and pollution, and the importance of sustainable management practices to preserve the earth's precious natural resources.
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What are four of the requirements for life on Earth? - ANS-✔✔Nutrients
Energy
Water
Temperature
What are the two principle components of weather? - ANS-✔✔Temperature and precipitation
How is climate made up? - ANS-✔✔Weather patterns prevail for year or centuries in a particular pattern.
Weather and climate are driven by what? - ANS-✔✔The sun
What happens before solar energy reaches Earth's surface? - ANS-✔✔It is modified by the atmosphere.
Where is UV radiation absorbed at? - ANS-✔✔Ozone layer
The average yearly temperatures are determined by the amounts of what? - ANS-✔✔Sunlight that reaches a given region, which in turn depends on latitude.
When the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, what season is experienced? - ANS-✔✔ Summer
When the Southern Hemisphere is tilted away from the sun, which season is experienced? - ANS-✔✔ Winter
The angle at which sunlight strikes Earth's surface produces what? - ANS-✔✔Climate zones with different temperatures and precipitations.
What density is warm air compared to cold air? - ANS-✔✔Less dense than cold air.
Which can hold more moisture? Cold or warm air? - ANS-✔✔Warm air
What does friction between winds and the ocean surface produce? - ANS-✔✔Ocean currents
What is it called when continents interrupt the currents, breaking them into roughly circular patterns? - ANS-✔✔Gyres
What way does gyres rotate in the Northern Hemisphere? - ANS-✔✔Clockwise
What way does gyres rotate in the Southern Hemisphere? - ANS-✔✔Counterclockwise
What also in variations within continents affect climate significantly? - ANS-✔✔Elevation
What do mountains also modify? - ANS-✔✔Rainfall patterns
What is it called when air moves down the far side of a mountain, it warms and absorbs water from the land. - ANS-✔✔Rain shadow
What creates the tropical rain forests? - ANS-✔✔Warm, moist conditions create productive biome on Earth.(TRF)
Rainforests have the highest what? - ANS-✔✔Biodiversity
Many coastal regions that border on deserts, such as those in southern California and much of the Mediterranean, support what? - ANS-✔✔The chaparral
What human impacts happen on chaparrals? - ANS-✔✔Housing development
People coming to live in these nice areas
What is the biome called that are typically located in centers on continents, such as North America and Eurasia, and receive 10 to 30 inches of rain annually? - ANS-✔✔Grasslands
What impacts do humans have on grasslands? - ANS-✔✔Nearly all tallgrass prairies have been plowed for agricultrure.
Overgrazed by cattle
Where do temperate deciduous forests form? - ANS-✔✔At their eastern edge, the North American grasslands merge into them.
What are some of the human impacts of temperate deciduous forests? - ANS-✔✔Hunting
Clearing for lumber
Where are temperate rain forests formed? - ANS-✔✔Places with abundant precipitation and mild winters, which means it has lots of moisture.
What is an impact of humans at temperate rain forests? - ANS-✔✔Tall, straight trees are valuable for lumber, so logging.
Where are northern coniferous forests formed? - ANS-✔✔Near grasslands and temperate forests, with long, cold winters.
What are the human impacts of the northern coniferous forests? - ANS-✔✔Clear cutting
Extraction of natural gases
What is the area called with a vast, treeless region, bordering the Arctic Ocean? - ANS-✔✔Tundra
Where are tundras formed? - ANS-✔✔Places with freezing winters, and little precipitation.
What are the human impacts of tundras? - ANS-✔✔Hiking
Off road vehicles
Oil drilling, etcetera
What zone is near the lake shore where it is shallow, and where plants find both abundant sunlight and nutrients? - ANS-✔✔Littoral zone
What zone is the most diverse parts of lakes, including the most diverse animal life? - ANS-✔✔Littoral zones
The open water region is divided into an upper ______ zone, in which enough light penetrates to support photosynthesis by plankton, and a lower ____________ zone, in which light is too weak for photosynthesis to occur. - ANS-✔✔Limnetic; profundal
What species dominate the limnetic zone? - ANS-✔✔Plankton and fish
What type of lakes are very low in nutrients and support relatively little life? - ANS-✔✔Oligtrophic lakes
What are wetlands that form where rivers meet oceans called? - ANS-✔✔Estuaries
What is dense stands of kelp found throughout the world in cool waters of the nearshore zone enriched by nutrient up welling called? - ANS-✔✔Kelp forests
What are human impacts of marine biomes? - ANS-✔✔Population growth led to housing, harbors, energy extraction, etcetera.
Pollution from run off from farming
What are the two components of an ecosystem? - ANS-✔✔The biotic compontent, and the abiotic component.
The community of living organisms. - ANS-✔✔Biotic component
Example of biotic - ANS-✔✔Bacteria, fungi, protists, plants, and animals in a given area.
All nonliving physical or chemical aspects of the environment. - ANS-✔✔Abiotic component
Example of abiotic - ANS-✔✔Climate, light, temperature, availability of water, and minerals in the soil.
Atoms and molecules that organisms obtain from their environment. - ANS-✔✔Nutrients
What does your body include? - ANS-✔✔Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen atoms that were once part of a dinosaur or a woolly mammoth.
A tiny fraction of energy reaches Earth in the form of electromagnetic waves including what? - ANS-✔✔ Heat, visible light, and ultraviolet energy.
How much of the energy that reaches Earth is visible light? - ANS-✔✔Half
Each category of organisms is called what? - ANS-✔✔Trophic level
Make their own food using inorganic nutrients and solar energy from the environment. - ANS-✔✔ Producers
Organisms that cannot photosynthesize. - ANS-✔✔Consumers (heterotrophs)
Feed directly and exclusively on producers. - ANS-✔✔Primary consumers
Primary consumers are herbivores, so what is an example of a primary consumer? - ANS-✔✔ Grasshopper, mice, and zebras form the second trophic level.
Meat eaters - ANS-✔✔Carnivores
Example of carnivores - ANS-✔✔Spider, hawks, and salmon, make up the higher-level consumers.
Carnivores act as what when they prey on herbivores? - ANS-✔✔Secondary consumers
Carnivores act as what when they prey on other carnivores? - ANS-✔✔Tertiary consumers
Dry biological material that is a good measure of the energy stored in organisms' bodies. - ANS-✔✔ Biomass
When a grasshopper eats grass, how much of the solar energy that's trapped by the grass is available to the insect? - ANS-✔✔Some
Illustrates the energy relationships between trophic levels. - ANS-✔✔Energy Pyramid
What are the most abundant animals? - ANS-✔✔Herbivors
What can biomagnification lead to? - ANS-✔✔Harmful and even fatal effects.
Example of Biomagnification - ANS-✔✔Mercury
Chemical building blocks of life that are required by organisms in large quantities. - ANS-✔✔ Macronutrients
Examples of macro nutrients - ANS-✔✔Water, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, oxygen, phosphorus, and calcium.
Required only in trace quantities. - ANS-✔✔Micro nutrients
Examples of micro nutrients - ANS-✔✔Zinc, iron, molybdenum, selenium, and iodine.
Describe pathways that macro nutrients and micro nutrients follow as they move from their major sources in the abiotic parts of ecosystems, called reservoirs, through living communities and back again.
The pathway that water takes as it travels from its major reservoir-- the oceans-- through the atmosphere, to reservoirs in freshwater lakes, rivers, and groundwater, and then back into the oceans. - ANS-✔✔Hydrologic cycle (water cycle)
Underground reservoirs - ANS-✔✔Aquifers
What is the hydro logic cycle crucial for? - ANS-✔✔Terrestrial communities
Pathway that carbon takes from its major short-term reservoirs in the atmosphere and oceans, through producers and into the bodies of consumers, detritivores, and decomposers, and then back again to its reservoirs. - ANS-✔✔Carbon cycle
Where do producers on land get their CO2 from? - ANS-✔✔Atmosphere
Where do aquatic producers get their CO2 from? - ANS-✔✔Dissolved CO2 in the water
Additional long-term reservoirs for carbon. - ANS-✔✔Fossil fuels
Example of fossil fuels - ANS-✔✔Coal, oil, and natural gas
Pathway taken by nitrogen from its primary reservoir-- nitrogen gas in the atmosphere-- to much smaller reservoirs of ammonia and nitrate in soil and water, through producers, consumers, detritivors and decomposers, and back to its reservoirs. - ANS-✔✔Nitrogen cycle
How much of the atmosphere is nitrogen gas? - ANS-✔✔78%
N2 is converted to ammonia by specific bacteria during a process called what? - ANS-✔✔Nitrogen fixation
Breaks down nitrates, releasing N2 back into the atmosphere. - ANS-✔✔Denitrifying bacteria
The overall impact of increased greenhouse gases is now usually called what? - ANS-✔✔Climate change
Spring snow in the Northern Hemisphere is what? - ANS-✔✔Declining
What are glaciers doing worldwide? - ANS-✔✔Retreating
Consists of all populations that interact with one another within a defined area - ANS-✔✔Ecological Community
Example of Ecological Community - ANS-✔✔In killing prey easy to catch, predators spare those individuals with better predation defenses.
The process by which two interacting species act on one another as agents of natural selection. - ANS-✔ ✔Coevolution
Major community actions - ANS-✔✔Competition, predation, parasitism, mutalism, and commensalism.
One benefits and other isn't changed or impacted - ANS-✔✔Commensalism
Each species has a special ecological niche that encompasses all aspects of its way of life. - ANS-✔✔ Ecological Niche
Important aspect of the ecological niche. - ANS-✔✔The organism's habitat.
What does an ecological niche include? - ANS-✔✔Includes all physical environmental conditions necessary for survival and reproduction of a given species.
Physical and environmental conditions can include what? - ANS-✔✔Nesting or denning sites
Climate
Type of nutrients the species requires
Optimal temperature range
Amount of water needed
The pH and salinity of the water or soil
The degree of sun or shade it can tolerate
What can no two species occupy? - ANS-✔✔The same ecological niche within the same natural community.
When does competition occur? - ANS-✔✔Whenever two organisms attempt to use the same, limited resources.
An interaction in which individuals of the same or different species attempt to use the same, limited resources, particularly energy, nutrients, or space. - ANS-✔✔Competition
When does inter specific competition occur? - ANS-✔✔Occurs between members of different species, if they feed on the same things or require similar breeding areas.
The greater the overlap between the ecological niches of the two species, the greater the amount of what between them? - ANS-✔✔Competition
Example of inter specific competition - ANS-✔✔Zebra mussels and quagga mussels, who both consume phytoplankton.
What do adaptations reduce? - ANS-✔✔The overlap of ecological niches among coexisting species.
What is one of the main factors driving evolution by natural selection? - ANS-✔✔Intraspecific competition
Who eats other organisms? - ANS-✔✔Predators
Example of a predator - ANS-✔✔An owl eating a mouse
Example of coevolution - ANS-✔✔Hunted fawn dappled spots that serve as camouflage, as well as the behavior of lying perfectly still when its mother is away.
Some prey animals have evolved very differently, exhibiting bright what? - ANS-✔✔Warning coloration
Refers to members of one species having evolved to resemble another species. Two or more distasteful species may each benefit from a shared warning coloration pattern. - ANS-✔✔Mimicry
Example of mimicry - ANS-✔✔Toxic monarch and viceroy butterflies have similar wing patterns; if a predator becomes ill from eating one species, it will avoid the other.
What is it called when animals have spots that resemble the eyes of a larger animal? - ANS-✔✔Startle coloration
Example of startle coloration - ANS-✔✔Peacock moth
Predators entice their prey to come close by resembling something attractive. - ANS-✔✔Aggressive mimicry
Example of aggressive mimicry - ANS-✔✔Using a rhythm of flashes that is unique to each species, female fireflies attract males to mate.
What lives in or on their prey, and weakens them, but not usually killing them right away? - ANS-✔✔ Parasites
What are parasites prey called? - ANS-✔✔Hosts
Example of parasites on hosts - ANS-✔✔A tick on a human.
Refers to interactions between species in which both benefit. - ANS-✔✔Mutualism
Example of mutualism - ANS-✔✔Lichens form a mutualistic relationship between a fungus and an algae.
A species on which other species in an ecosystem largely depend, such that if it were removed the ecosystem would change drastically. - ANS-✔✔Keystone species
Example of keystone species - ANS-✔✔African elephant
A gradual change in a community and its nonliving environment in which assemblages of plants and animals replace one another in a sequence that is reasonably predictable. - ANS-✔✔Succession
What happens during succession? - ANS-✔✔1. Early organisms modify the environment in ways that favor later organisms