Chapter 52 and 56.4 practice problems Flashcards
Explain how the sun’s unequal heating of the Earth’s surface results in deserts near 30 degree north and south of the equator
High temperatures in the tropics warm and evaporate water into the air, causing moisture and rain in the tropical areas, while pushing cool, dry air about 30 degrees north and south, causing deserts to form in those regions.
What are some of the differences in microclimate between an unplanted agricultural field and a nearby stream corridor with trees?
Stream corridor is going to be cooler, more moist, shadier than the unplanted field.
Changes in Earth’s climate at the end of the last ice age happened gradually, taking centuries to thousands of years. If the current global warming happens very quickly, as predicted, how may this
rapid climate change affects the evolution of long-lived trees compared to that of annual plants, which have much shorter generation times.
Trees that require a long time to reach reproductive age are likely to evolve more slowly than annual
plants in response to climate change, constraining their potential more than annual plants in response to
climate change
Give examples of human actions that could expand a species’ distribution by changing it’s a)dispersal or b) biotic interactions.
a) humans could transport a species to a new area that was once not possible due to a geographical barrier
b) humans could kill off a predator or prey thus changing the biotic interactions of organisms that used to participate with said predator/prey
You suspect that deer are restricting the distribution of a tree species by preferentially eating the seedlings of the tree. How might you test this hypothesis?
Planting seedlings in a controlled environment with no deer, and comparing the growth patterns of each
Describe a scenario showing how ecological change and evolution can affect one another.
Changes to how organisms interact with one another and their environment can cause evolutionary change. In turn, evolutionary change (like a predator being better equipped to detect its prey) can alter ecological interactions.
There are vast stores of organic matter in the soils of northern coniferous forests and tundra around the world. Suggest an explanation for why scientists who study global warming are closely
monitoring these stores.
Decomposers are consumers that use nonliving, organic matter as fuel for cellular respiration, which release CO2 as a byproduct. Because high temperatures lead to faster decomp, organic matter in these (once frozen) soils could be decomposed producing CO2 more rapidly, thereby speeding up climate change
