Midterm Flashcards
Hans Rosling
Reassessing population statistics, reasons for optimism (Factfullness - his book)
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)
Environmental Ethics
John Muir (1838-1914)
Naturalist, Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, Sierra Club
Henry Thoreau (1817- 1862)
Civil disobedience, simple living
Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
Biologist, Silent Spring, Wilderness preservation, DDT Ban
Paul Ehrlich
Population bomb, population growth leading to environmental damage
Michael Soule
Started society for conservation biology
Jared Diamond
Historical review of environmentalists
EO Wilson
Naturalist, Conservation writing
Soule’s Organizational Values (5)
Biological Diversity has intrinsic value
The untimely extinction of species should be prevented
The diversity of species and the complexity of biological communities should be preserved
Science plays a critical role in understanding ecosystems
Collaboration among scientists, managers, policy makers is necessary
Normative Science
Developed, presented or interpreted based on an assumed preference for a particular outcome
Conservation science is at its basis normative science
Occams Razor (parsimony
Simpler explanations are more likely to be correct
Hitchens Razor
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence
Aldens Razor
If something cannot be settled by experiment or observation, then it is not worthy of debate
Sagan Standard
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
Popper’s falsifiability principle
For a theory to be considered scientific it must be falsifiable
Why do we often study vertebrates in conservation? (4)
Are sometimes keystone species
Individuals are large
Can be recognized
Have economic value
Levels of biodiversity indicators (4)
Regional-Landscape
Community-Ecosystem
Population-Species
Genetic
3 Levels of assessment for these commodities
Structural
Functional
Compositional
Factors for predicting biodiversity (5)
Geography: latitude, longitude, altitude Climate: temperature, rainfall, stability Soils Primary productivity The human history of occupation
Hotspot criteria (2)
Irreplaceable: must have at least 1 500 vascular plants as endemics
Threatened: has to have at least 70% of its primary vegetation. 36 areas (60% of world’s species, live on 2.4% of land surface)
Species richness
simply the number of species in a community
Species evenness
Is the distribution of abundances across species
Species diversity
is a measure of the number of species and abundance of each species
Ecosystem level attributes (4)
Health
Stability
Resistance
Resilience
Biodiversity measures (4)
Richness: different scales (alpha, beta, gamma)
Evenness: diversity indices
Intactness: response to human activity
Ecological functions
Species richness scales (3)
Alpha: the number of species at a specific site (within site)
Gamma: the number of species per region
Beta: this is the gamma/alpha. Richness between sites within the region. Measures the turnover or change
Shannon Index
This is the measure of evenness in the population
A larger Shannon value means more even and more uncertainty