Exam I Flashcards
1
Q
What is biogeography?
A
- Science that documents and understands spatial patterns of biodiversity
- Real life pattern: life varies from place to place in a highly predictable, non- random fashion
EX: Why are most of the marsupials concentrated in Australia? - Real life pattern: living things are very diverse (5 to 100 million species)
EX: List of unstudied organisms– Microbes, nematodes, deep ocean, insects
- Microbes are barely identified, research has barely touched the surface - Only about 1.5 million have been described
2
Q
What is Phytogeography?
A
Deals with the geographical distribution of plants
3
Q
What is Zoogeography?
A
Deals with the geographical distribution of animals
4
Q
What is microbial biogeography?
A
- The distribution pattern of microorganisms/
- Poorly understood
- Untapped field
- No one really studies
5
Q
What is historical biogeography?
A
- Attempts to reconstruct origin, dispersal, and extinction of taxa
- Answers questions like “why do bears appear in mostly temperate climates?” and “why are there marine iguanas in the Galapagos?”
6
Q
What is ecological biogeography?
A
- Accounts for present distributions and geographic variation in diversity in terms of interactions between organisms and their environment
- Answers questions like “how does competition differ from the temperate area to the tropics?” and “how do catastrophes affect the distribution of organisms?”
7
Q
What different kinds of biogeographies did we talk about in class?
A
Microbial, historical, and ecological
8
Q
What does it mean that biogeography is a synthetic discipline?
A
- Biogeography incorporates data from ecology systematics, evolution, and Earth sciences.
9
Q
What is pattern vs. process?
A
- Science starts with patterns, then leads to mechanistic explanations, then testing of hypotheses to develop theory
- Deductive vs inductive
10
Q
What is deductive reasoning?
A
- Hypothesis testing
- This is more what you do in organic chemistry classes and general biology labs
11
Q
What is inductive reasoning?
A
- You make observations, develop a hypothesis, and then a theory
- This is what Darwin did. He did no testing to come up with natural selection. He made a hypothesis off of observations that were later tested by Gregory Mendel
12
Q
Who is the father of biogeography?
A
Alfred Wallace
13
Q
When was the first issue of the Journal of Biogeography?
A
1973
14
Q
What were some factors in the growth of biogeography?
A
- Tied to the development of new technologies (mapping, statistical) and growth of phylogenetic knowledge (with new genetic tools)
- Major growth has also come as a product of need to understand and manage impact of humans on Earth
EX: Every time we flush toilets or take showers, the water will go to the ocean. In Tyler, the water goes through these water sources: Mud creek –> Lake Tylerr –> Angelina river –> Neches river –> Gulf of Mexico. In these water sources, these like estrogen from birth control are not removed, which have a major effect on aquatic organisms including all female populations of a species of fish in Columbus, Ohio. An example of human impact is the dead zone that occurs where the MS river goes into the Gulf of Mexico. The dead zone is the size of Rhode Island were nothing grows or lives because of the huge algae blooms caused by pesticide runoffs. Wetlands are the solution to this problem because this is where bacteria has the ability to remove a lot of the toxins in the water. - By the 1970s-1980s, we realized humans were having an impact of global scale including increase in atmospheric CO2, extinctions of species and biodiversity, and loss or alteration of natural habitat
EX: Barrier islands in Gulf of Mexico are taken over by Oil rigs, these were meant to break up hurricanes. Oil rigs shut down. Hurricanes flood Houston, Galveston, and Corpus. Katrina was preventable but all barrier islands were taken over by oil rigs or have silted in. These barrier islands should have taken the major hit of the hurricanes before they moved inland.
15
Q
What search did biogeography start with?
A
The quest for the ark
