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Ecology & Marine Biology

200 cards · 🇺🇸 English

Ecosystems, biomes, population dynamics, nutrient cycles and marine life.

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Ecology

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  1. 1Ecology
    The natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their environment, from Ancient Greek oîkos (house) and -logía (study of)
  2. 2Main levels that ecology considers
    Individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels
  3. 3Ecosystem
    A dynamically interacting system of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living (abiotic) components of their environment
  4. 4Ecosystem services
    Life-supporting functions ecosystems provide, such as biomass production, climate regulation, biogeochemical cycles, water filtration, soil formation, erosion control, and flood protection
  5. 5Panarchy in ecological terms
    A framework organizing ecology's hierarchy that exhibits non-linear behaviors where small changes to critical variables can lead to disproportionate, perhaps irreversible, system changes
  6. 6Biodiversity
    An abbreviation of 'biological diversity' describing the diversity of life from genes to ecosystems, spanning every level of biological organization
  7. 7Three main types of biodiversity
    Species diversity, ecosystem diversity, and genetic diversity
  8. 8Natural capital
    Natural resources that support populations and are critical for maintaining ecosystem services
  9. 9Habitat
    The environment over which a species occurs and the type of community that is formed; regions in environmental space composed of multiple dimensions of biotic and abiotic variables
  10. 10Fundamental niche
    The set of environmental conditions under which a species is able to persist
  11. 11Realized niche
    The set of environmental plus ecological conditions under which a species actually persists (usually smaller than fundamental niche due to competition)
  12. 12Ecosystem engineering
    When organisms directly or indirectly modulate the availability of resources to other species by causing physical state changes in biotic or abiotic materials, thereby modifying, maintaining, and creating habitats
  13. 13Niche construction
    Related to ecosystem engineering but also considers the evolutionary implications of physical changes to the environment and feedback on natural selection
  14. 14Biomes
    Larger units of organization that categorize regions of Earth's ecosystems mainly according to the structure and composition of vegetation
  15. 15Name five major terrestrial biomes.
    Tropical rainforest, temperate broadleaf and mixed forest, taiga, tundra, and hot desert
  16. 16Microbiome
    The community of microorganisms in a particular environment; includes human and oceanic microbiomes discovered through advances in molecular genetics
  17. 17Biosphere
    The largest scale of ecological organization; the total sum of ecosystems on the planet
  18. 18Gaia hypothesis
    An example of holism in ecological theory stating there is an emergent feedback loop generated by metabolism of living organisms that maintains Earth's core temperature and atmospheric conditions within a narrow self-regulating range
  19. 19Population ecology
    The study of the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the wider environment
  20. 20Malthusian growth model
    A primary law of population ecology stating that a population will grow (or decline) exponentially as long as the environment experienced by all individuals remains constant
  21. 21Four basic variables in simplified population models
    Death, birth, immigration, and emigration
  22. 22Logistic equation
    A population growth model developed by Pierre Verhulst that includes a crowding coefficient, representing the reduction in population growth rate per individual added
  23. 23Carrying capacity (K)
    The equilibrium population size where rates of increase and crowding are balanced in the logistic growth model
  24. 24Metapopulation
    Defined in 1969 as 'a population of populations which go extinct locally and recolonize'
  25. 25How is migration different from other movement?
    Migration involves the seasonal departure and return of individuals from a habitat and is a population-level phenomenon
  26. 26How is dispersal different from migration?
    Dispersal involves one-way permanent movement of individuals from their birth population into another population, unlike the seasonal return characteristic of migration
  27. 27Community ecology
    The study of interactions among a collection of species that inhabit the same geographic area, examining how these interactions affect abundance, distribution, and diversity
  28. 28Ecosystem ecology
    The science of determining the fluxes of materials (e.g., carbon, phosphorus) between different pools and understanding the underlying causes of these fluxes
  29. 29Food web
    The archetypal ecological network showing complex feeding relationships; a type of concept map used to illustrate and study pathways of energy and material flows
  30. 30Food chain
    The simplified linear feeding pathway that moves from a basal trophic species to a top consumer

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